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Is there a way to easily search for / list template repositories on Github?

Templates are quite interesting because they allow to create a new project from a, well, template without having to get all the history with it.

An example with Spring Boot : https://github.com/Spring-Boot-Framework/Spring-Boot-Application-Template.

I tried the usual search on Github itself but using the "template" query doesn't give any meaningful results because many repositories use the "template" string without the actual Github meaning. I couldn't find any way to tag those repos either. Even the API search page doesn't seem to include proper qualifiers for template repositories.

That leaves me to wonder how they can actually become useful since the discoverability is so low at the moment.

Thanks!

jlengrand
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2 Answers2

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Got an answer from Github support yesterday. As of now, it is not possible.

Hi Julien,

Thank you for writing to GitHub Support.

If I understand you correctly, you want a way to search for repositories but only show template repositories.

If so, then, unfortunately such functionality does not exist. If you want, I can pass this ticket to our product team which reads and evaluates feedback about our products.

Regards,
Paul
GitHub Support
jlengrand
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As a workaround, you can use your search engine of choice:

my query site:github.com "Public template"

All templates have this "Public template" badge next to their name, so this should give you almost exclusively templates as results.

MCO
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