Project templates are in Alpha. The feature is incomplete and standard SLAs do not apply. Don’t use it for production workloads. It is available to Enterprise customers on Cloud. Self-hosted customers can access it as an early preview via Octopus 2026.2. We’re actively developing this feature and would love your feedback.
Overview
Project templates are reusable project blueprints that can be shared across multiple spaces in Octopus Deploy. Instead of manually configuring each new project from scratch, defining deployment steps and variables every time, you create a single template that any space can use as a starting point. This ensures teams follow the same standards and removes the risk of configuration drift.
To create or manage your project templates, navigate to the Platform Hub. If you haven’t set up your Git repository, you must do so before creating a project template.
- Navigate to Project Templates in Platform Hub.
- Give the project template a Name and an optional Description.
- Create your project template.
After creating your template, Octopus adds the template’s folder and OCL files to your Git repository. If you’ve already created templates or are joining an existing team, you’ll see the existing templates on the overview page.
You can now define the deployment process, parameters, and variables for the template.
Deployment process
The deployment process defines the steps Octopus orchestrates when deploying a project created from this template. Each project template has a single deployment process, and you can use Octopus’s built-in steps, step templates, community step templates, and process templates to define it.
Projects created from the template can’t modify the deployment process. They can’t add, remove, reorder, or disable steps. The only thing a project can configure is the parameter values explicitly exposed in the template, ensuring every project based on the template follows the same deployment process.
Some steps behave differently inside the project template editor. Instead of letting you set a value directly, they ask for parameters or variables. Parameters are required when a step requires a resource that Platform Hub can’t define, such as a Worker Pool, and that resource must be supplied by the project. These fields accept parameters so projects can provide the right values for their context.
Unlike standard projects, project templates validate the deployment process when you publish, not when you commit. You can save an incomplete process and continue configuring parameters and variables before publishing. This will change once we add inline parameter and variable configuration to the deployment process editor.
If your deployment process includes a process template configured to auto-update on patch or minor versions, those updates flow through to templated projects automatically, even without you publishing a new version of the project template. This means two releases created on different days could use different versions of the process template, without anyone making any change to the project template or the project itself. We’re interested in your feedback on whether this behavior meets your expectations.
Parameters
Parameters let you define the inputs a user must supply when they create a project from the template. They’re the mechanism for making a template flexible. Rather than hardcoding values that differ between teams or spaces, you expose them as parameters.
In the Alpha release, project templates don’t support parameter scoping or sensitive parameter values. We’re still working out how parameters, variables, and scoping should work in project templates and expect this to evolve throughout Alpha. We’d love your feedback.
For a full reference of supported parameter types and default values, see Template parameters.
To create a parameter, navigate to the Parameters tab on your project template and add a new parameter.
Variables
Variables in a project template work the same way as project variables in a standard Octopus project. Any variable you define is available to the deployment and can be selected in steps.
Unlike parameters, users can’t change the variables defined in a template when creating a project from it. Use variables for values that must be consistent across every project, like accounts. If you need users to provide their own value, expose it as a parameter instead.
Variable values can reference parameters, letting you combine fixed template-level values with project-supplied inputs where needed.
In the Alpha release, the variable types you can use are limited to text, sensitive, and resources currently available in Platform Hub, such as Accounts. Variable scoping is also not supported. We’re adding support for additional resource types throughout Alpha. We’d love your feedback on what you need.
Git repository structure
Octopus stores each project template as a folder in the Platform Hub Git repository. The folder name is a slug derived from the template name. Each folder contains four OCL files:
project-templates/<template-slug>/
deployment_process.ocl
parameters.ocl
template.ocl
variables.ocltemplate.oclcontains the template settingsdeployment_process.oclcontains the deployment process stepsparameters.oclcontains the parameters defined for the templatevariables.oclcontains the variables defined for the template
Octopus stores published versions, sensitive variables, and space sharing configurations in the database, not in the Git repository.
Committing, publishing, and sharing
After you’ve configured your project template, see Publishing and sharing templates for how to commit, publish, and share it.
Using a project template
After you publish and share a template, users in a space can create a new project from it. For details on creating and managing templated projects, see Templated projects.
Feedback
Project templates are in Alpha and we’re actively shaping how the feature works. If you run into something unexpected or have thoughts on how parameters, variables, scoping, or anything else should work, we’d love to hear from you. Share your feedback to help us build this the right way.
Help us continuously improve
Please let us know if you have any feedback about this page.
Page updated on Monday, March 16, 2026