gitpatcher is a Gradle plugin that can manage patches for Git repositories for you (example). This is useful if you need a few smaller changes for a Git repository that can't be contributed upstream, but you still easily want to keep up to date with upstream. gitpatcher manages a local submodule as base, and applies patches from a configurable folder in an extra repository. A local Git installation on the PATH is required for it to run.

1. Add a submodule for the project you want to patch.
2. Apply gitpatcher to your Gradle project:

plugins {
    id 'net.minecrell.gitpatcher' version '0.9.0'
}

3. Configure gitpatcher:

patches {
    // The submodule path you just created
    submodule = 'upstream'
    // The target folder for the patched repositories
    target = file('target')
    // The folder where the patches are saved
    patches = file('patches')
}

4. That's it! Now you can initialize your repository (see below) and start making commits to it. Then just make the patches and you can apply it to the target repository as often as you want.