UserVM Handbook/Windows
This guide details how to set up a UserVM on a host machine running Microsoft Windows.
 | We do not support CollabVM server on Windows. We strongly recommend that you install a Linux distribution and follow the main UserVM Handbook instead. If you experience problems with this guide, you may receive help in the CollabVM discord, but this is not a guarantee and you may be on your own if it's not a simple fix. |
The Rules
First, the boring part. We ask that all hosts review and follow the UserVM Hosting Rules.
Prerequisites
You'll need:
- A machine with decent specs (8GB of RAM and a modern CPU, probably)
- Microsoft Windows 10 or later. For Linux, see the main UserVM Handbook.
- A decently fast network that allows you to forward a port. We will not accept UserVMs behind services like ngrok. Cloudflare tunnels are fine. You must also have a URL that stays persistent. If your IP is dynamic, you can use services like NOIP or setup a script to auto-update your domain using cloudflare.
- Basic knowledge of how computers and Windows systems work. We aren't going to hold your hand, you need to be comfortable with a command line
- A few hours
Compiling the server
Install dependencies
Open Command Prompt as administrator.
First, install the Chocolatey package manager. If you already have it installed, you can skip this step.
powershell -c "Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))"
Restart CMD to apply the changes to PATH. Now, we'll install the various dependencies CollabVM has:
choco install git mingw llvm nasm cmake nodejs nssm rust visualstudio2019-workload-vctools
Once again, restart CMD to apply PATH changes.
Enable corepack:
corepack enable
Prepare the server
We can now get the server ready. First, create a directory for all CollabVM related files. For the purposes of this guide, we use C:\collabvm. If you use a different directory, be sure to substitute it in all future commands.
mkdir C:\collabvm
Clone the CollabVM server source:
git clone https://github.com/computernewb/collabvm-1.2.ts.git C:\collabvm\collabvm-1.2.ts --depth 1 --recursive
cd C:\collabvm\collabvm-1.2.ts
Install dependencies and build the server:
set TURBOJPEG_DYNAMIC=1
yarn
yarn build