You have a local clone of a github repository, somebody created a pull request against this repository and you would like to apply it to your clone before the maintainer of the origin actually merges it.

How to do that?

It is actually surprisingly neat. When you look at the url of a github PR:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/42

You can just add ‘.patch’ at the end of the url to get a nicely formatted email patch:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/42.patch

From there on, you have a few options. If you download the patch (in say pr.patch) at the root of your clone, you can apply it:

git am ./pr.patch

If you want to apply the code patch without actually apply the commits, you can use your old trusty patch command:

patch -p 1 < ./pr.patch

If you are lazy (as my director studies always said, ‘laziness drives progress’), you can do all in one line:

wget -q -O - 'https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/42.patch' | git am