diff --git a/.gitlab-ci.yml b/.gitlab-ci.yml
index 0c82f9217696e1eeabac3ac573bc2dfbf877bed1..8e493382712e1a2b9fa0f1c867b3676db5617b97 100644
--- a/.gitlab-ci.yml
+++ b/.gitlab-ci.yml
@@ -9,11 +9,10 @@ before_script:
   - apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends libcurl4-openssl-dev libxext6
   - apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends qpdf pandoc pandoc-citeproc
   - R -e 'install.packages(c("testthat", "rmarkdown"));'
-  - R -e "install.packages(c('parallel', 'data.table', 'ggplot2', 'gridExtra', 'glmmTMB', 'magrittr', 'MASS', 'reshape2', 'rlang', 'stats', 'utils', 'BiocManager', 'car'))" 
+  - R -e "install.packages(c('matrix', 'parallel', 'data.table', 'ggplot2', 'gridExtra', 'glmmTMB', 'magrittr', 'MASS', 'reshape2', 'rlang', 'stats', 'utils', 'BiocManager', 'car'))" 
   - R -e "BiocManager::install('S4Vectors', update = FALSE)"
   - R -e "BiocManager::install('DESeq2', update = FALSE)" 
   - R -e 'install.packages(setdiff(desc::desc()$get_deps()$package, c(installed.packages(), "R")));'
-  - git submodule init && git submodule update
 
 devtools-check:
   stage: build