In SharePoint, you might have faced the requirement to create content types in one central location/site collection and re-use them in different site collections. The central location, where you keep all the content types is called Content Type HUB. We will go through step-by-step process to setup the Content Type HUB.

The step-by-step process of setting up the Content Type HUB

Create a new Web Application and Site Collection for Content Type HUB (Content Type Publisher):

1. Go to Central Administration >> Application Management >> Manage web applications >> New. You can follow the steps to create web application for the guidance.
2. Create one site collection in this newly created web application, please refer to this article. This Site collection will act as a HUB of the content types and you can publish the content type to other web applications to consume.
3. Go to Newly created site collection >> Site Settings >> Site collection feature
4. Activate Feature - Content Type Syndication Hub

5. Go to Central administration >> Application Management >> Manage service applications

6. Click on Managed Metadata Service

7. Click on Properties from the Ribbon Bar


Here, we are going to set properties of Managed Metadata Service Application. These properties can be changed later.


1. Name: You can update the name of your Managed Metadata Service Application
2. Database Server: Enter the SQL server name where your content database will be created
3. Database Name – Enter the Database name for New web application
4. Database Authentication - As shown below you can keep windows authentication which is recommended or you can provide Account and password for SQL Authentication
5. Failover server – If you have any other server as part of database mirroring, then specify the server name here.

6. Application pool: Enter the name of the Application Pool. You can either Use existing application pool or Create new application pool
7. Security Account: Select a Security account for the application pool, created/selected in the step above.
8. Content Type HUB: In Content Type HUB Section, enter the newly created Site Collection (Content Type Publisher)
9. Report syndication import errors from Site Collections using this service application: If any error occurs during the syndication of Content Type, then logs will be generated at the Consumer Site collection as well as in the Publisher Site Collection.
10. Add this service application to the farm’s default list: If you tick this option, this Managed Metadata Service will be added to the farm’s default services listing. This option will be available only at the time of creating a new Managed Metadata service.
8. Click on the Managed Metadata Service Sub Section

9. Click on Properties from the Ribbon Bar

10. Make sure 3^rd and 4^th options are checked.

11. Now go to Content Type Publisher Site Collection.
12. Create a Content Type or click on the existing content type that you want to publish
13. Click on Manage publishing for this content type.

14. Content Type Publishing: You will find three options over here.
    1. Publish: You will see his option Enabled only if the content type is getting published for the First Time. Select this option to make this content type available to all the Consumer Site Collections to use.
    2. Unpublish: You will see this option Enabled only if you have published the content type at least once. Select this option to make this content type unavailable to all Consumer Site Collections. If there’s any existing copy of published content type in consumer Site Collection, then that content type will become local copy to that consumer site collection.
    3. Republish: First Time onwards if you want to publish your changes to the consumer sites, you need to select this option.
    
15. Publishing History: On the same page you can see when the last time this content type was published. If you don’t find any date, that means the content type was never published.
16. Select the option and press OK.
17. Now, go to Central administration >> Monitoring.

18. Click on Review job definitions

19. You will find two types of Timer job. You need to Run both the Timer Jobs as shown in the next steps
1. Content Type Hub Job: This Job is on farm level.
2. Content Type Subscriber Job: You can see, there are multiple instances of this Job. One instance for every web application. So, on whichever Web Application you run the Timer job, the Published content type will be available to that Web Application >> Site Collections only.

20. Timer Job will run on its scheduled time. If you want to run the Timer Job forcefully, click on the Job and press Run Now.

21. Now go to Consumer Site Collection >> Site Settings >> Content Types. You will be able to see Published content type.

Conclusion:

We have gone through all the steps and their use/importance in order to setup Content Type HUB. The steps mentioned over here were performed on SharePoint 2013 on-premise environment.