Save publishing site as template – The right way using PnP Provisioning

By João Ferreira Oct 29, 2017 Office 365 12 Comments

…if you are familiar with remote provisioning technics which I’ve been promoting for years, this is a kind of similar model. You create a site, out of the box site and then apply actions on top of it so you don’t break the site by using something evil like site definitions or web templates…

Save your newly created sites as templates is one of the best features on SharePoint, it saves you a lot of time and work if you want to replicate them in your environment but this is not the best way of doing it as explained in the quote above specially if you are using Publishing features.

In this article I’ll explain you how to save and deploy a Publishing site using the PnP PowerShell and the PnP Provisioning.

PnP PowerShell

The PnP PowerShell encapsulates all the complexity of CSOM and Rest APIs and provides over 240 commands to easily modify your existent site. In this article I’ll not take advantage of all the commands, instead I’ll use only the ones related with the provisioning engine.

To get the latest version of the PnP PowerShell click here.

PnP Provisioning

The PnP Provisioning Engine allows you to model Content Types, Site Columns, List Definitions, Pages and much more however it does not extract any of the content from your site except for the home page.

Get site template

The provisioning starts by establishing a connection to the site that you want to save using the command:

Connect-PnPOnline -Url "https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/publishing" -Credentials WCMStoredCredentials

If you have multifactor authentication enabled in your tenant the above instruction might fail, instead you can use the command:

Connect-PnPOnline -Url "https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/publishing" -UseWebLogin

The next step is to extract the template saving the custom master pages and the publishing files, if you are not using any of those you can remove the options PersistBrandingFiles and PersistPublishingFiles.

Get-PnPProvisioningTemplate -Out "C:\Path\to\template.xml" -PersistBrandingFiles -PersistPublishingFiles;

Depending of the content of your site it might take a few minutes to generate the template, once the process finishes you will get all the master pages, the publishing assets and an XML file with your site definition.

Bellow you have the complete PowerShell script that you can use to download the template, make sure you update the variables to your own values before executing it.

# Variables definition
$tenant = "contoso";
$sourceSite = "/sites/department/template/";
$templateFile = "C:\path\to\file\temnplate.xml";
 
# Office 365 Login 
$webUrl = "https://{0}.sharepoint.com{1}/" -f $tenant, $sourceSite;
Write-Output $("Connecting to {0}" -f $webUrl);
Connect-PnPOnline -Url $webUrl -Credentials WCMStoredCredentials;
#use the line bellow to connect if you are using multi factor authentication  
#Connect-PnPOnline -Url $webUrl -UseWebLogin;
 
# Save Template
Write-Output "Saving PnP template";
Get-PnPProvisioningTemplate -Out $templateFile -PersistBrandingFiles -PersistPublishingFiles;

Set site template

The process to apply the site template starts with the login in your tenant using the command:

Connect-PnPOnline -Url "https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/publishing" -Credentials WCMStoredCredentials

If you have multifactor authentication enabled in your tenant the above instruction might fail, instead you can use the command:

Connect-PnPOnline -Url "https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/publishing" -UseWebLogin

The next step is get the site context and apply the template to it, if you don’t have the site created yet you can also create it using the PnP PowerShell.

$web = New-PnpWeb -Title "Title" -Url "fromTemplate" -Description "PnP Site" -Locale 1033 -Template "BLANKINTERNET#0"


Finally run the command bellow to apply the template to your site, it will try to figure out if the assets you are trying to provision already exist in the site. If it does it will be modified to match the definition in the template if it doesn’t it will be created.

Apply-PnPProvisioningTemplate -Web $web -Path "C:\Path\to\template.xml"

As a complement you can enable the log by using the command bellow, it might be useful if something goes wrong during the template application.

Set-PnPTraceLog -On -LogFile " C:\Path\to\log.xml " -Level Debug

Bellow you have the complete PowerShell script that you can use to apply the template, make sure you update the variables to your own values before executing it.

# Define variables
$tenant = "contoso";
$targetSite = "/sites/department/template/";
$templateFile = "C:\path\to\file\temnplate.xml";
$siteTitle = "New Publishing Site";
$siteDescription = "Publishing site created with PnP Provisioning";
$siteUrl = "PnPSite";
 
# Office 365 Login 
$webUrl = "https://{0}.sharepoint.com{1}/" -f $tenant, $targetSite;
Write-Output $("Connecting to {0}" -f $webUrl);
Connect-PnPOnline -Url $webUrl -Credentials WCMStoredCredentials;
#use the line bellow to connect if you are using multi factor authentication  
#Connect-PnPOnline -Url $webUrl -UseWebLogin;
  
# Get site context
Write-Output $("Getting site context {0}" -f $siteTitle);
$newSite = (Get-PnPWeb).ServerRelativeUrl + "/" + $siteUrl

# If the site does not exist creates it
if((Get-PnPSubWebs).ServerRelativeUrl -contains $newSite){
    #Get site context
    $web = Get-PnPWeb -Identity $newSite
} else {
    #Creates the publishing site and gets context
    $web = New-PnpWeb -Title "$siteTitle" -Url "$siteUrl" -Description "$siteDescription" -Locale 1033 -Template "BLANKINTERNET#0"
}

# Apply template
Write-Output $("Applying PnP template [{0}] to site [{1} ({2})]" -f $templateFile, $web.Title, $web.Url);
Set-PnPTraceLog -On -LogFile "C:\path\to\file\log.txt" -Level Debug
Apply-PnPProvisioningTemplate -Web $web -Path $templateFile 

Conclusion

The PnP provisioning is an extremely powerful and flexible tool, it might not get by default all the data that you want to incorporate in your template but with a few tweaks to the XML file you can easily add it.

Keep in mind that the instructions provided in this article are not for publishing sites only, if you are considering the creation of site templates this is the approach you should follow, it supports both classic SharePoint sites and Modern sites.

I recommend you to watch Erwin van Hunen showing all the potential of the PnP PowerShell and the Provisioning in the video bellow.

Download Provisioning Scripts