UserVM Handbook

Welcome to the official guide on setting up a UserVM.

Prerequisites

You'll need:

A machine with decent specs (8GB of RAM and a modern CPU, probably)
A Linux distribution; You can pick any mainstream distro, for the purposes of this guide I recommend either Debian/Devuan or Arch/Artix. I recommend the OpenRC versions (Devuan/Artix) but that's just preference, pick what you're comfortable with. Yes, Ubuntu will work, it's terrible though
Basic knowledge of how computers and Linux systems work. We aren't going to hold your hand, you need to be comfortable with a command line
A few hours

First up make sure you have git installed:

sudo pacman -S --needed git # Arch
sudo apt install git # Debian

Now let's clone the source. This is assuming you're in your home directory but you can clone it wherever

git clone https://github.com/computernewb/collabvm-1.2.ts.git
cd collabvm-1.2.ts

Next, we need to install Node.js, as well as the server dependencies. First, node:

sudo apt install npm nodejs # Debian
sudo pacman --needed -S npm nodejs # Arch

Then install dependencies

npm i

Finally, build the server

npm run build