Generating and applying git patches

Git has a feature called patches that is great for quickly delivering stuff to other teams when there's a fire happening. It might not be the most elegant solution, since sending the code in a form of file doesn't sound too safe, but hey, it works and does the job!

In the nice happy world you would just add another remote and cherry pick stuff from one to another. This sounds solid, but sometimes takes quite a while, especially if you want to push to some new repository, on a different git provider and you need to setup a new SSH keys just for one pull and one push. Doesn't seem pragmatic to me. In such cases, I tend to just go with the patches. There are two ways of patching that you can choose from.

Multiple patch files

The first one will generate multiple patch files. One per commit. Here's how you do this:

$ git format-patch -3

It will create a patch files from the last three commits. And then apply it with (not sure what am acronym means, but I always translate it to apply many)

$ git am

Git will automatically scan for those files and apply them in correct order.

Single patch file

Or the second way, my favorite, is squashing everything into one patch file, like so:

$ git format-patch -3 --stdout > your-patch-name.patch

and then applying it with

$ git apply your-patch-name.patch