gittutorial | Note : Its better to add your name somewhere in the middle

In the man page of git, there is a line which says:

When reading the documentation of git, I seemed to find a contradiction.

In this official tutorial of git, git log -p is said to show the history of commits together with complete diff info. However, in the documentation of git-log, the -p option is said to produce a patch file instead of directly output. Also, the description "they do not produce the output described above" is confusing, since the "described above" is very vague, at least for me.

Other than the section given above, I only find one other place mentioning the -p option, which matches the description in the tutorial instead of the patch part. Also, when I run git log -p on my computer, its shows commit history together with diff info, and I don't see any patch files generated. So are the two parts of the documentation contradictory? Or do I misunderstood the process of "generating patch files"? Thank you!

I must have read from top-to-bottom more than twenty articles about Git and Wordpress in the last 24 hours, along with all the relevant questions and answers on this Stack site, but most are either too specific (and therefore outdated) to be still relevant or they're concerned with taking a site from local to live rather than the other way around. Most importantly, not a single one includes information on what commands are actually needed for the process, which is a necessity when it comes to something as unintuitive as version control tools are.

I have a site that I developed locally with XAMPP. I then used FTP and the Duplicator plugin to upload the site and database to a shared server. I've been using FTP to make changes since then, and I'd now like to incorporate Git into my workflow to make things more productive/natural. The goal is to be able to transfer the site between my local development server and the production server - without Github or another repository service in between.

However, even as someone with lots of CLI experience, after all the articles I've read and after also having scoured through man git and man gittutorial, I'm still very confused about how to use Git to do what I'm trying to do here.

For example, I know that when I'm making changes locally I do git commit and then git push to push those changes to the live server, but how do I firstly download the contents of my live server to start working with it locally in Git - do I do git clone or do I do: