ZANARDI Bruno

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Apply a series of patches from a mailbox.

Apply a patch to files and/or to the index.

Prepare patches for e-mail submission.

Create a patch

You cloned a git repository, modified the source code, made some commits and for a reason or an other you can’t / don’t want to push them but you want to share them with the project maintainer? Build a patch and send it to him (or her) by email!

The basic command is git format-patch, and here is the options you can use.

You know how much commits you want to share

Replace {x} by the number of commits. Git will create a patch which contains the {x} last commits starting from HEAD included.

You know your first commit hash

Git will create a patch which contains all the commits since the parent (excluded) of your first commit

You did your commits in a branch

Git will create a patch which contains all the commits since your branch start.

These three commands will create a file in the current directory you can send to the project maintainer.

Check a patch

You created a patch or you received a patch by email, and you want to check it before sending / apply it?

Run this command:

It will show you the same output than git diff --stat.

You also can check if this patch is applicable to your working directory? Also use git apply command, but with the --check option:

It will tell you if you will be able to apply the patch without conflicts.

Apply a patch

Yes, we can use apply to apply the patch, but we won’t. Instead, we’ll use am. Why? Because am has the --signoff option which will put the name and the email of the patch maker in the commit identification.

The -k option is used to keep the text between [] in the patch commits messages.

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Reminder

am

apply

format-patch

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