How to apply a patch generated with git format-patch?

Note: You can first preview what your patch will do:

First the stats:

git apply --stat a_file.patch

Then a dry run to detect errors:

git apply --check a_file.patch

Finally, you can use git am to apply your patch as a commit. This also allows you to sign off an applied patch.
This can be useful for later reference.

git am --signoff < a_file.patch 

See an example in this article:

In your git log, you’ll find that the commit messages contain a “Signed-off-by” tag. This tag will be read by Github and others to provide useful info about how the commit ended up in the code.

git apply name-of-file.patch