How do patches work in Git?

Question

I'm new to Git, but familiar with SVN. As a test I made a repository in a local directory with git init. Then I cloned the empty repository (over SSH using 127.0.0.1, which is another thing I wanted to test) to another local directory. I added some files in repository 2, I did git add * and finally git commit -a -m "First source code".

I now want to create a patch using git format-patch and apply it on repository 1. How do I do this? I know there's a manual, but these things are terribly complicated and make me wanna do certain things to my monitor.

Answer 1

Create your patch via:

$ git format-patch master --stdout > patch.diff 

then patch.diff will contain the diff, which you can then send to someone else to apply using:

$ git am < patch.diff 

Sometimes, when the manuals are a little dense, it makes sense to look for a tutorial:

http://luhman.org/blog/2009/09/22/git-patch-tutorial