Download Github pull request as unified diff

Question

How can I download the changes contained in a Github pull request as a unified diff?

Solution 1

To view a commit as a diff/patch file, just add .diff or .patch to the end of the URL, for example:

• https://github.com/weppos/whois/pull/90
• https://github.com/weppos/whois/pull/90.diff
• https://github.com/weppos/whois/pull/90.patch

Solution 2

Somewhat related, to let git download pull request 123 and patch it into mylocalbranch locally, run:

git checkout -b mylocalbranch
git pull origin pull/921/head

Solution 3

To get the PR changes into your local repo in an staged but uncommitted state, so you can review:

git pull origin pull/123/head --no-commit

And to generate a patch file from that:

git diff --cached > pr123.diff    

Comments

[hansvb]

Great, thanks. And there is also .patch. Why is this not exposed in the GUI? How is one supposed to discover this?

[sehe]

It's not documented to keep stackoverflow in business. Honestly, that is FAQ #2

[Tekkub]

Also because git pull is the preferred method of downloading and applying the changes.

[mirabilos]

Ooooh, thanks, this answer is worth gold. (That blogposting too.) I wonder how anyone sane can work without that, and why it is not exposed in the crappy-enough-as-is Web UI.

[Cory Trese]

Thank you so much. This is very useful for porting changes from Github into SVN or whatever repo you have. They all accept diff and patch, so this is a great way to make changes more portable. Thanks!

[Rohit Choudhary]

but how to ignore prefixes? a and b coming before file paths

[MoonStom]

Or to get the pull request onto a new PR branch git fetch origin pull/921/head:PR and then merge with your current branch, giving you a chance to review the changes git merge PR --no-commit --no-ff

[JBert]

The full documentation is at help.github.com/articles/checking-out-pull-requests-locally

[jww]

This requires you to setup Git with your credentials. You cannot anonymously test a proposed change (like you could by apply a diff manually). Yet another instance of Git taking a simple workflow and making it difficult.

[rakslice]

Judging by what these return and the the links in the docs at developer.github.com/v3/media/… , the .diff URL gives a straight diff to the default branch based on git-diff git-scm.com/docs/git-diff output, and the .patch URL gives a concatenation of the individual commits in the PR (each relative to their parent commit) in a format suitable for e-mailing based on git-format-patch git-scm.com/docs/git-format-patch output.

[ivan_pozdeev]

@RohitKumarChoudhary use -p1 with patch.

[Mandar Vaze]

I reached here via a google search, and few hours later, I noticed that github now shows this as a "ProTip" below each PR

[cambunctious]

Apply the PR commits to your repo in one line: curl <patch url> | git am