# DVC initialized subdir invisible when using dvc.api to accecss data in a remote GitHub repo

**URL:** <https://discuss.dvc.org/t/dvc-initialized-subdir-invisible-when-using-dvc-api-to-accecss-data-in-a-remote-github-repo/1711>\
**Category:** Questions\
**Created:** [June 28, 2023, 1:22pm UTC](https://discuss.dvc.org/t/dvc-initialized-subdir-invisible-when-using-dvc-api-to-accecss-data-in-a-remote-github-repo/1711 "2023-06-28T13:22:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![SweetPotato](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9bcb4/32.png) [@SweetPotato](https://discuss.dvc.org/u/SweetPotato)\
**Post date:** [June 28, 2023, 1:22pm UTC](https://discuss.dvc.org/t/dvc-initialized-subdir-invisible-when-using-dvc-api-to-accecss-data-in-a-remote-github-repo/1711/1 "2023-06-28T13:22:28Z")

</div>

Hi,

I have a GitHub monorepo containing a few subdirectories. DVC was initialized in only one of them, using `dvc init --subdir`. After initializing DVC, quite some data was added to the subdir and committed to DVC and quite some changes committed to Git.

I want to use `dvc.api` to access the data, however running

```auto
from dvc.api import DVCFileSystem
url = "git@github.com:ORG/repo-name.git"
fs = DVCFileSystem(url)
fs.find("/", detail=False)

```

returns only the files in the root and all other subdirectories of the GitHub repo, except the one where DVC was initialized. It seems as though this subdir is invisible to `dvc.api`. Trying to pass `dvc_only=True` or the path to the subdir always just returns an empty list.

Running `dvc.api.scm.all_commits()` does show SHAs of all commits. When trying to check out a certain commit hash, the same happens as described above – it’s as though the DVC initialized subdir is invisible to `dvc.api`.

What am I doing wrong? I’m using DVC Version: 3.2.2.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![SweetPotato](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9bcb4/32.png) [@SweetPotato](https://discuss.dvc.org/u/SweetPotato)\
**Post date:** [June 29, 2023, 5:23pm UTC](https://discuss.dvc.org/t/dvc-initialized-subdir-invisible-when-using-dvc-api-to-accecss-data-in-a-remote-github-repo/1711/2 "2023-06-29T17:23:13Z")

</div>

I found the answer to my question in the `DVCFileSystem` docstring. To see the DVC initialized subdirs, `subrepos` argument needs to be passed to the function:

```auto
fs = DVCFileSystem(url, subrepos=True)

```

Before, I was looking at the [docs](https://dvc.org/doc/api-reference/dvcfilesystem), where this info is missing.

Leaving this here in case it can help someone else.