Applying patches with Git and curl or wget

Jesús Amieiro

1 year ago

There are some methods to apply the code from a pull request (PR) to a base branch.

E.g., if you want to test this PR, you can use the GitHub CLI and this command in your local repository.

gh pr checkout 3

But this only works at GitHub, so you can do something similar, and valid for different places, using the patch from the PR.

Table of Contents

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Getting the patch

If you add the “.patch” text to the PR URL, you are going to get the patch file from this PR:

You can do something similar with the content from an individual commit, not from all commits of a PR:

To apply one of this patches to the current branch, you can get the patch with curl or with wget and then apply the patch:

curl -L -O https://github.com/amieiro/GlotPress/pull/3.patch
wget https://github.com/amieiro/GlotPress/pull/3.patch

And then you can apply the patch

git apply 3.patch

Finally, you need to remove the patch file:

rm 3.patch

You can do the whole process in one step, using Unix pipes with curl:

curl -L https://github.com/amieiro/GlotPress/pull/3.patch | git apply -v

Or with wget:

wget -q -O - https://github.com/amieiro/GlotPress/pull/3.patch | git apply -v

In both situations, you don’t need to remove any local file.

You can do the same with another relevant players, like GitLab, Bitbucket,…

To obtain the patch, you need to add the .patch text to the URL.