doc/administration/custom_project_templates.md
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To speed up the creation of projects on your instance, configure a group that contains template projects. Users can then create new projects based on your templates that include the common tooling and configuration you specify.
To learn more about what data is copied from template projects, see what is copied from the templates.
Before you make template projects available to your instance, select a group to manage the templates. To prevent any unexpected changes to templates, create a new group for this purpose, rather than reusing an existing group. If you reuse an existing group created for a different purpose, users with the Maintainer role might edit the template projects without understanding the side effects.
Prerequisites:
To select the group to manage the project templates for your instance:
After you configure the group as a source for project templates, new projects added to this group become available as templates.
After you create a group to manage the template projects, configure the visibility and feature availability of each template project.
Prerequisites:
Repository and database information that are copied over to each new project are identical to the data exported with GitLab project import and export. This includes the full Git commit history from the template project. For more information, see migrate GitLab data by using file exports.
To create a template without commit history, initialize your template project with a single commit that contains all the files you want to include.