Saving Site as Template Creates New Features?

Question

New to SharePoint. Working with a on-premise 2013 SharePoint system. Im trying to save a site as a template from Production and copying the resulting template WSP file into my DEV environment. There were no problems uploading and activating the WSP file in my DEV environment. But when I try to create a new sub-site with this template I get the following error saying:

The element of type 'ContentType' for feature 'PropertySite2018ListInstances' (id: d207df8e-248f-4e21-b634-e0563c3bb9d1) threw an exception during activation

I don't recall ever creating or installing any feature with this name. Using powershell, I confirm the feature does exist in my production:

But of course this does not exist in my DEV environment.

My question is, does "saving as template" cause these features to be created by SharePoint?

How do I copy these features into my DEV environment?

Answer 1

Answering my own question, I opened the WSP file with Visual Studio looked at the ONet.xml file which contains the feature ID and property:

    <!--List Feature-->
            <Feature ID="{d207df8e-248f-4e21-b634-e0563c3bb9d1}" Name="List Feature">
                <Properties>
                    <Property Key="GeneratedBySaveAsTemplate" Value="1" />
                </Properties>
            </Feature>
            <!--Module Feature-->
            <Feature ID="{1e02f9fb-40ba-4c92-9a99-d61f6c35523e}" Name="Module Feature">
                <Properties>
                    <Property Key="GeneratedBySaveAsTemplate" Value="1" />
                </Properties>
            </Feature>
            <!--Web EventReceivers Feature-->
            <Feature ID="{1ca694b7-6eef-4b63-8e93-1944fac6f47d}" Name="Web EventReceivers Feature">
                <Properties>
                    <Property Key="GeneratedBySaveAsTemplate" Value="1" />
                </Properties>
            </Feature>
            <!--CustomAction Feature-->
            <Feature ID="{2e726362-745c-438c-8c22-d99aaba7a805}" Name="CustomAction Feature">
                <Properties>
                    <Property Key="GeneratedBySaveAsTemplate" Value="1" />
                </Properties>
            </Feature>
            <!--Property Bag Feature-->
            <Feature ID="{01e82ebe-40e6-4176-b39e-da13f83180ff}" Name="Property Bag Feature">
                <Properties>
                    <Property Key="GeneratedBySaveAsTemplate" Value="1" />
                </Properties>
            </Feature>
        </WebFeatures>

Looking at the Key="GeneratedbySaveAsTemplate", I am guessing this clue indicates these features were some how created by SharePoint. I don't know the reason or how this works but I guess this is enough to answer this question.

Answer 2

Try to use this, its available also to SharePoint 2013 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/solution-guidance/introducing-the-pnp-provisioning-engine

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/sharepoint/sharepoint-pnp/sharepoint-pnp-cmdlets?view=sharepoint-ps