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# Custom instance-level project templates **(PREMIUM SELF)**

As an administrator, you can configure a group that contains projects available for
use as the source of project templates on your instance. You can then
[create a new project](../user/project/index.md#create-a-project-from-a-custom-template),
that starts from the template project's contents.

To learn more about what is copied from the template project, see
[What is copied from the templates](../user/group/custom_project_templates.md#what-is-copied-from-the-templates).

## Select a group to manage template projects

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 already in use for development work, users with the Maintainer role
might modify the template projects without understanding the side effects.

To select the group to manage the project templates for your instance:

1. On the left sidebar, at the bottom, select **Admin Area**.
1. Select **Settings > Templates**.
1. Expand **Custom project templates**.
1. Select a group to use.
1. Select **Save changes**.

After the group is configured as a source for project templates, any new projects
subsequently added to this group are available for use as templates.

## Configure a project for use as a template

After you create a group to manage the templates for your instance, configure the
visibility and feature availability of each template project.

Prerequisites:

- You must be either the administrator of the instance, or a user with a role
  that allows you to configure the project.

1. Ensure the project belongs to the group directly, and not through a subgroup.
   Projects from subgroups of the chosen group can't be used as templates.
1. To configure which users can select the project template, set the
   [project's visibility](../user/public_access.md#change-project-visibility):
   - **Public** and **Internal** projects can be selected by any authenticated user.
   - **Private** projects can be selected only by members of that project.
1. Review the project's
   [feature settings](../user/project/settings/project_features_permissions.md#configure-project-features-and-permissions).
   All enabled project features should be set to **Everyone With Access**, except
   **GitLab Pages** and **Security and Compliance**.

Repository and database information that are copied over to each new project are
identical to the data exported with the [GitLab Project Import/Export](../user/project/settings/import_export.md).

## Related topics

- [Custom group-level project templates](../user/group/custom_project_templates.md).