In the installation instructions, the first step is: git submodule update --init --recursive However, this does not work if I click the github link to download the latest release as a zipped directory, because .git does not exist in this case! In order to install, I have to: git clone https://github.com/algbio/themisto.git and then, this works correctly: git submodule update --init --recursive It would be great if you could document this in the README so that others can install themisto without trouble :-)