I wish to set up an old laptop I have as basically a multitrack recorder through my Behringer XR18 mixer. The idea is that I run as minimalist a distro as possible and have Ardour start automatically at boot, fullscreen, on a new project (that I will generate with a shell script according to date and possibly time) with all the tracks routed and armed for recording. AFAICT (from the Manual) Ardour can only either start existing projects or new empty projects.
if you pass “–help” or “-h” to the startup of ardour, it will list the possible options that can be passed to it…
(there is one for template when I check with ardour-5.12)
I can’t say the path or what option would be for the template option in your case – it says here you’ve come back to the forum after x years, … so if you’re working with an earlier release, you can try to see what parameter is getting used for that particular release…
tl;dr it’s broken in 5.12 
So… I suppose the best alternative for now is to have an actual project somewhere to use as a template and copy the folder to another one at startup, and start that project instead. I bet it’s even better because you can maintain armed status of tracks?