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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | CONFIGURATION | SUBMODULES | SEE ALSO | GIT | COLOPHON |
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GIT-APPLY(1) Git Manual GIT-APPLY(1)
git-apply - Apply a patch to files and/or to the index
git apply [--stat] [--numstat] [--summary] [--check]
[--index | --intent-to-add] [--3way] [--ours | --theirs | --union]
[--apply] [--no-add] [--build-fake-ancestor=<file>] [-R | --reverse]
[--allow-binary-replacement | --binary] [--reject] [-z]
[-p<n>] [-C<n>] [--inaccurate-eof] [--recount] [--cached]
[--ignore-space-change | --ignore-whitespace]
[--whitespace=(nowarn|warn|fix|error|error-all)]
[--exclude=<path>] [--include=<path>] [--directory=<root>]
[--verbose | --quiet] [--unsafe-paths] [--allow-empty] [<patch>...]
Reads the supplied diff output (i.e. "a patch") and applies it to
files. When running from a subdirectory in a repository, patched
paths outside the directory are ignored. With the --index option,
the patch is also applied to the index, and with the --cached
option, the patch is only applied to the index. Without these
options, the command applies the patch only to files, and does not
require them to be in a Git repository.
This command applies the patch but does not create a commit. Use
git-am(1) to create commits from patches generated by
git-format-patch(1) and/or received by email.
<patch>...
The files to read the patch from. - can be used to read from
the standard input.
--stat
Instead of applying the patch, output diffstat for the input.
Turns off "apply".
--numstat
Similar to --stat, but shows the number of added and deleted
lines in decimal notation and the pathname without
abbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. For binary
files, outputs two - instead of saying 0 0. Turns off "apply".
--summary
Instead of applying the patch, output a condensed summary of
information obtained from git diff extended headers, such as
creations, renames, and mode changes. Turns off "apply".
--check
Instead of applying the patch, see if the patch is applicable
to the current working tree and/or the index file and detects
errors. Turns off "apply".
--index
Apply the patch to both the index and the working tree (or
merely check that it would apply cleanly to both if --check is
in effect). Note that --index expects index entries and
working tree copies for relevant paths to be identical (their
contents and metadata such as file mode must match), and will
raise an error if they are not, even if the patch would apply
cleanly to both the index and the working tree in isolation.
--cached
Apply the patch to just the index, without touching the
working tree. If --check is in effect, merely check that it
would apply cleanly to the index entry.
-N, --intent-to-add
When applying the patch only to the working tree, mark new
files to be added to the index later (see --intent-to-add
option in git-add(1)). This option is ignored if --index or
--cached are used, and has no effect outside a Git repository.
Note that --index could be implied by other options such as
--3way.
-3, --3way
Attempt 3-way merge if the patch records the identity of blobs
it is supposed to apply to and we have those blobs available
locally, possibly leaving the conflict markers in the files in
the working tree for the user to resolve. This option implies
the --index option unless the --cached option is used, and is
incompatible with the --reject option. When used with the
--cached option, any conflicts are left at higher stages in
the cache.
--ours, --theirs, --union
Instead of leaving conflicts in the file, resolve conflicts
favouring our (or their or both) side of the lines. Requires
--3way.
--build-fake-ancestor=<file>
Newer git diff output has embedded index information for each
blob to help identify the original version that the patch
applies to. When this flag is given, and if the original
versions of the blobs are available locally, builds a
temporary index containing those blobs.
When a pure mode change is encountered (which has no index
information), the information is read from the current index
instead.
-R, --reverse
Apply the patch in reverse.
--reject
For atomicity, git apply by default fails the whole patch and
does not touch the working tree when some of the hunks do not
apply. This option makes it apply the parts of the patch that
are applicable, and leave the rejected hunks in corresponding
*.rej files.
-z
When --numstat has been given, do not munge pathnames, but use
a NUL-terminated machine-readable format.
Without this option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are
quoted as explained for the configuration variable
core.quotePath (see git-config(1)).
-p<n>
Remove <n> leading path components (separated by slashes) from
traditional diff paths. E.g., with -p2, a patch against
a/dir/file will be applied directly to file. The default is 1.
-C<n>
Ensure at least <n> lines of surrounding context match before
and after each change. When fewer lines of surrounding context
exist they all must match. By default no context is ever
ignored.
--unidiff-zero
By default, git apply expects that the patch being applied is
a unified diff with at least one line of context. This
provides good safety measures, but breaks down when applying a
diff generated with --unified=0. To bypass these checks use
--unidiff-zero.
Note, for the reasons stated above, the usage of context-free
patches is discouraged.
--apply
If you use any of the options marked "Turns off apply" above,
git apply reads and outputs the requested information without
actually applying the patch. Give this flag after those flags
to also apply the patch.
--no-add
When applying a patch, ignore additions made by the patch.
This can be used to extract the common part between two files
by first running diff on them and applying the result with
this option, which would apply the deletion part but not the
addition part.
--allow-binary-replacement, --binary
Historically we did not allow binary patch application without
an explicit permission from the user, and this flag was the
way to do so. Currently, we always allow binary patch
application, so this is a no-op.
--exclude=<path-pattern>
Don’t apply changes to files matching the given path pattern.
This can be useful when importing patchsets, where you want to
exclude certain files or directories.
--include=<path-pattern>
Apply changes to files matching the given path pattern. This
can be useful when importing patchsets, where you want to
include certain files or directories.
When --exclude and --include patterns are used, they are
examined in the order they appear on the command line, and the
first match determines if a patch to each path is used. A
patch to a path that does not match any include/exclude
pattern is used by default if there is no include pattern on
the command line, and ignored if there is any include pattern.
--ignore-space-change, --ignore-whitespace
When applying a patch, ignore changes in whitespace in context
lines if necessary. Context lines will preserve their
whitespace, and they will not undergo whitespace fixing
regardless of the value of the --whitespace option. New lines
will still be fixed, though.
--whitespace=<action>
When applying a patch, detect a new or modified line that has
whitespace errors. What are considered whitespace errors is
controlled by core.whitespace configuration. By default,
trailing whitespaces (including lines that solely consist of
whitespaces) and a space character that is immediately
followed by a tab character inside the initial indent of the
line are considered whitespace errors.
By default, the command outputs warning messages but applies
the patch. When git-apply is used for statistics and not
applying a patch, it defaults to nowarn.
You can use different <action> values to control this
behavior:
• nowarn turns off the trailing whitespace warning.
• warn outputs warnings for a few such errors, but applies
the patch as-is (default).
• fix outputs warnings for a few such errors, and applies
the patch after fixing them (strip is a synonym — the tool
used to consider only trailing whitespace characters as
errors, and the fix involved stripping them, but modern
Gits do more).
• error outputs warnings for a few such errors, and refuses
to apply the patch.
• error-all is similar to error but shows all errors.
--inaccurate-eof
Under certain circumstances, some versions of diff do not
correctly detect a missing new-line at the end of the file. As
a result, patches created by such diff programs do not record
incomplete lines correctly. This option adds support for
applying such patches by working around this bug.
-v, --verbose
Report progress to stderr. By default, only a message about
the current patch being applied will be printed. This option
will cause additional information to be reported.
-q, --quiet
Suppress stderr output. Messages about patch status and
progress will not be printed.
--recount
Do not trust the line counts in the hunk headers, but infer
them by inspecting the patch (e.g. after editing the patch
without adjusting the hunk headers appropriately).
--directory=<root>
Prepend <root> to all filenames. If a "-p" argument was also
passed, it is applied before prepending the new root.
For example, a patch that talks about updating a/git-gui.sh to
b/git-gui.sh can be applied to the file in the working tree
modules/git-gui/git-gui.sh by running git apply
--directory=modules/git-gui.
--unsafe-paths
By default, a patch that affects outside the working area
(either a Git controlled working tree, or the current working
directory when "git apply" is used as a replacement of GNU
patch) is rejected as a mistake (or a mischief).
When git apply is used as a "better GNU patch", the user can
pass the --unsafe-paths option to override this safety check.
This option has no effect when --index or --cached is in use.
--allow-empty
Don’t return an error for patches containing no diff. This
includes empty patches and patches with commit text only.
Everything below this line in this section is selectively included
from the git-config(1) documentation. The content is the same as
what’s found there:
apply.ignoreWhitespace
When set to change, tells git apply to ignore changes in
whitespace, in the same way as the --ignore-space-change
option. When set to one of: no, none, never, false, it tells
git apply to respect all whitespace differences. See
git-apply(1).
apply.whitespace
Tells git apply how to handle whitespace, in the same way as
the --whitespace option. See git-apply(1).
If the patch contains any changes to submodules then git apply
treats these changes as follows.
If --index is specified (explicitly or implicitly), then the
submodule commits must match the index exactly for the patch to
apply. If any of the submodules are checked-out, then these
check-outs are completely ignored, i.e., they are not required to
be up to date or clean and they are not updated.
If --index is not specified, then the submodule commits in the
patch are ignored and only the absence or presence of the
corresponding subdirectory is checked and (if possible) updated.
git-am(1).
Part of the git(1) suite
This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control
system) project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual
page, see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩. This page was obtained
from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At that time,
the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2025-08-07.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Git 2.51.0.rc1 2025-08-07 GIT-APPLY(1)
Pages that refer to this page: git(1), git-am(1), git-apply(1), git-config(1), git-diff(1), git-range-diff(1), git-rebase(1), git-stripspace(1)