This guide will show you how to run Evlan on a Windows system, starting with the binary distribution. This guide was written for Evlan v0.3.3, but the same instructions probably apply to future versions by simply substituting the correct version number.

Before we start, allow me to explain briefly how Evlan operates. Evlan is designed to run as a background process, with only one copy of the virtual machine running on a particular system. You then connect to this process via the Evlan command client in order to issue commands. If you are only trying to play around with Evlan, this probably sounds over-complicated, but for people running Evlan servers (like me), it is very useful.

Start by unpacking the zip. Inside, you will find the evlan executable, the command client (an executable Java JAR), a batch file for initializing the evlan state (which just runs evlan.exe with the --create switch), and the Evlan modules.

At this point you may want to edit the Evlan config file to configure things like whether or not to accept remote connections and what your password should be. Take your favorite text editor to the file:

modules\evlan.org\internal\Config.evlan

Read the comments and edit the fields as appropriate. This may be a good time to read up on setting up SSL.

Run evlan-init. This starts the virtual machine with a fresh state. You will see some state files created, but note that these will be empty until you actually tell the VM to save something to them.

The VM is now running with a fresh state. You can now use the Evlan client to connect to the VM and issue commands (see setting up the command client). While connected, issue the following command to save the state:

/do system.service.saveState()

This will save the current state of the virtual machine to those state files.

To stop the VM, just close the console window. To run again later and restore your saved state, just run evlan rather than evlan-init.