Apply SharePoint Online template using PnP PowerShell

Posted on 29 January، 2018

In this article we will define a template, and apply it for other SPO sites using PnP library
Please follow these steps :

1. 1. Set-up PnP module latest version from here https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP-PowerShell/releases
   2. Go to your SPO tenant, and create a SPO Site, you can also define (List structure, Theme, Pages, Content Types) because all of those will be part of the template.
   3. Make sure that the app catalog is activated on the tenant (There is no relation between app catalog and the tenant, but there is a bug found in January PnP package that required App catalog to be activated or a failure occurred)
   4. After having the site ready, run the below PowerShell command:
      $Creds = Get-Credential
$SiteURL = "https://test.sharepoint.com/sites/demo1/"
Connect-PnPOnline -Url $SiteURL -Credentials $Creds
Get-PnPProvisioningTemplate -Out C:\temp\demo1Template.xml

   5. You should see a progress running for a while to export all settings.
   6. Please open the XML file at the provisioned path (C:\temp\demo1Template.xml), and have a look, it is also doable to do medications through the file, by adding items, or fields, but you need to be careful not to crap the schema.
   7. Now it is time to import it to the destination site, Create a destination site on SPO with a default teamsite template
   8. Apply the new template by running the below command.
      $DestUrl = "https://test.sharepoint.com/sites/destination1/"
Connect-PnPOnline -Url $DestUrl -Credentials $Creds
$template = Load-PnPProvisioningTemplate -Path "C:\temp\demo1Template.xml"
Apply-PnPProvisioningTemplate -InputInstance $template


After this, refresh the destination site, and you should see the template applied.
I suggest to start first with a simple template, then apply more complexity to it. this approach should run smoothly also with SP2016, but I haven’t tried to import a template from SPO and import it to 2016 or vise versa