UserVM Handbook/Windows

Revision as of 04:21, 5 August 2024 by Elijah (talk | contribs)

This guide details how to set up a UserVM on a host machine running Microsoft Windows.

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:

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