Git Tip: Apply a Patch

I learned a new thing this weekend: we apparently can apply a patch onto a branch/fork using git apply [patchfile].

There’s a few things to unpack here. First off, what’s a patchfile?

The long story cut short is that a patchfile is nothing more than a plain text file that contains all information about diffs between one commit and another. If you’ve ever used the git diff command, you’ll know that it will output a diff between the current state of a repository, and the last committed state. Let’s take a look at an example.

Say we have a file, called my_file.txt. In a real world example, this would be parallel to, say, a .py module that you’ve written. After a bunch of commits, I have a directory structure that looks like this:

$ ls
total 8
drwxr-xr-x   4 ericmjl  staff   128B Jun 17 10:26 ./
drwx------@ 19 ericmjl  staff   608B Jun 17 10:26 ../
drwxr-xr-x  12 ericmjl  staff   384B Jun 17 10:27 .git/
-rw-r--r--   1 ericmjl  staff    68B Jun 17 10:26 my_file.txt

The contents of my_file.txt are as follows:

$ cat my_file.txt
Hello! This is a text file.

I have some text written inside here.

Now, let’s say I edit the text file by adding a new line and removing one line.

$ cat my_file.txt
Hello! This is a text file.

I have some text written inside here.

This is a new line!

If I looked at the “diff” between the current state of the file and the previous committed state of the file:

$ git diff my_file.txt
diff --git a/my_file.txt b/my_file.txt
index a594a37..d8602e1 100644
--- a/my_file.txt
+++ b/my_file.txt
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
 Hello! This is a text file.

-I have some text written inside here.
+This is a new line!

While this may look intimidating at first, the key thing that one needs to look at is the + and -. The + signals that there is an addition of one line, and the -signals the removal of one line.

Turns out, I can export this as a file.

$ git diff my_file.txt > /tmp/patch1.txt
$ cat /tmp/patch1.txt
diff --git a/my_file.txt b/my_file.txt
index a594a37..d8602e1 100644
--- a/my_file.txt
+++ b/my_file.txt
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
 Hello! This is a text file.

-I have some text written inside here.
+This is a new line!

Now, let’s simulate the scenario where I accidentally discarded those changes in the repository. A real-world analogue happened to me while contributing to CuPy: I had a really weird commit history, and couldn’t remember how to rebase, so I exported the patch from my GitHub pull request (more on this later) and applied it following the same conceptual steps below.

$ git checkout -- my_file.txt

Now, the repository is in a “cleaned” state — there are no changes made:

$ git status
On branch master
nothing to commit, working tree clean

Since I have saved the diff as a file, I can apply it onto my project:

$ git apply /tmp/patch1.txt
$ git status
On branch master
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)

        modified:   my_file.txt

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

Looking at the diff again, I’ve recovered the changes that were lost!

$ git diff
diff --git a/my_file.txt b/my_file.txt
index a594a37..d8602e1 100644
--- a/my_file.txt
+++ b/my_file.txt
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
 Hello! This is a text file.

-I have some text written inside here.
+This is a new line!

Don’t forget to commit and push!

How to export a patch from GitHub?

I mentioned earlier that I had exported the patch file from GitHub and then applied it on a re-forked repository. How does one do that? It’s not as hard as you think.

Here’s the commands below with comments.

# Download the patch from the pull request URL.
# Replace curly-braced elements with the appropriate names.
# Export it to /tmp/patch.txt.
$ wget https://github.com/{repo_owner}/{repo}/pull/{pr_number}.patch -O /tmp/patch.txt

# Now, apply the patch to your project
$ git apply /tmp/patch.txt