I routinely find myself looking up the differences between the HTTP methods (aka verbs) PUT and PATCH. While there’s plenty of nuance, some of which I’ll get to below, the tl;dr is:

PATCH and PUT have different semantics. PUT means create/replace and it is idempotent. PATCH means update (full or partial) and it is not idempotent.¹

The Wikipedia article on HTTP has a great table which summarizes several of the HTTP methods - I’ve adapted it lightly below: ².

While William Durand may object, I like how simple PATCH makes it to update a record: Instead of having to GET the record’s most recent data so that you can replace the entire record with a PUT, with PATCH, you can just declare what you’d like set. ³

For example - update user 123 the body can be as simple as:

PATCH /users/123

{ "email": "new.email@example.org" }

Related: Idempotence

Footnotes

• ¹ Patch verb by dlee | GitHub
• ² Hypertext Transfer Protocol | Wikipedia
• ² Please. Don’t Patch Like An Idiot. | William Durand