Feature Request / Discussion: Best practices for sharing a centralized team-schema/template across multiple repositories

[clay-good]

Note

Moved from issue #1131, originally opened by @ismferd on 2026-05-27. Continuing the conversation here in Discussions — the original issue thread (including any comments) stays available at #1131 for the record.

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Background

Our team is adopting OpenSpec to standardize our Software Design Documents (SDD) and technical specifications across multiple projects. To maintain consistency, we have designed a centralized team-schema (a standardized template/structure) that every service or project should follow when documenting their architecture.

The Problem

Currently, our organization operates across multiple independent repositories. We want every repository to populate and adhere to this centralized team-schema whenever an SDD is created or updated.

We want to avoid a manual copy & paste approach, as it scales poorly, makes updating the schema difficult, and will eventually lead to schema drift across different projects.

Questions & Proposed Capabilities

Since OpenSpec relies on Markdown structures and workspace configurations, we would like to know the community's or maintainers' recommendations on handling multi-repo environments:

1. Remote/Shared Templates: Does OpenSpec support (or plan to support) fetching configuration/templates from a remote URL or a shared central repository instead of local files?
2. Extensibility: Is there a recommended way to extend a base schema stored externally?
3. Best Practices for Git Layouts: For teams using OpenSpec at scale, what is the preferred approach? (e.g., Git Submodules, NPM-like packaging for markdown components, or CI/CD automation to inject the schema at build time?)

Suggested Workarounds We Are Considering

• Git Submodules: Injecting the central schema repo into each project's workspace.
• GitHub Actions Automation: Setting up a workflow that pushes updates from the central schema repository to downstream repositories via automated Pull Requests.

We would love to know if there are any native features in OpenSpec's roadmap to facilitate this, or if you have any recommendations for multi-repo architectures.

Thanks for this amazing tool!