How to generate patch for all commits in a branch?

Question

How can I generate patch for all commits in a given branch by knowing only the branch name?

This step is part of a complex workflow all of which is being automated.

Answer 1

If you know from which branch your "given branch" has been created, then making a patch is easy:

git diff master Branch1 > ../patchfile
git checkout Branch2    
git apply ../patchfile

(and you can generate a patch applicable without git too)

But finding the right "creation commit" of a branch can be complex: see "Finding a branch point with Git?"

The OP akirekadu used:

git format-patch $(git merge-base --fork-point master)..branchB 

You can see it used in "git diff between working copy and branch base"

legends2k adds in the comments:

One can verify the generated patch with git apply --stat patchfile
This won't apply, but give the details of the patch.

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Warning: AGP notes in the comments that:

$(git merge-base --fork-point master)..branchB command may not find the correct branch root revision every time

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ijoseph points out in the comments

Incidentally, Phabricator handles this kind of stuff seamlessly by automatically generating those patch files for each push.