How can I install/manage CiviCRM patches on Drupal 8 (using Composer)?

Question

I sometimes need to fix a bug in CiviCRM before that bug is fixed in the latest version of CiviCRM. With non-composer installations, I patch my dev site, commit my changes to git, and push them to a repo, then deploy to test/live sites.

Using composer, CiviCRM isn't in my git repo. What's a reasonable way to manage patches so they a) persist across upgrades, b) can be managed in git?

Alternately: I'd like to test a patch that someone thinks will fix a bug in my CiviCRM installation. How can I do that?

Answer 1

Drupal 8/CiviCRM has the composer-patches package already installed. So you can add a section to the "extra" element in composer.json called "patches", and list out the patch with a title and a URL (or path) to a .diff file. Here's an example where I add four patches to standard CiviCRM:

diff --git a/composer.json b/composer.json
index 453ff74..5827a69 100644
--- a/composer.json
+++ b/composer.json
@@ -68,6 +68,14 @@
         ]
     },
     "extra": {
+        "patches": {
+          "civicrm/civicrm-core": {
+            "core#609, PR 13390.": "https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/13390.diff",
+            "core#580, PR 13373.": "https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/13373.diff",
+            "membership#9, PR#13553 (membership renewal notification fix)": "https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/13553.diff",
+            "reporting#8, PR 13653 (thank-you dates on contribution reports)": "https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/13653.diff"
+          }
+        },
         "patchLevel": {
             "drupal/core": "-p2"
         },

Note: If you don't use the excellent roundearth/civicrm-composer-plugin but instead use the full manual process to update CiviCRM, you'll need to perform the update steps every time you run composer install with patches.