Building a Windows Domain with BoxStarter

I had a need to create and recreate Windows domains for some lab work I’ve been up to. What follows here is adapted from @davidstamen who blogs here. More specifically it is extracted from his Vagrant Windows lab, here.

Warning! Boxstarter is sort of like curl pipe sudo bash for Windows.

First things first, look over what we’re doing:

What is going on here?

• The first two lines contain the domain name you’d like configured.
• Lines 4 & 5 make Explorer a bit less annoying and enable remote desktop (if it’s not already).
• Lines 7 - 15 install some useful packages
• Line 18 enables AD
• Line 22 installs the domain.

All of that is simple enough. The magic comes in when we use boxstarter to go from a new Windows Server to Domain Controller. From an admin command prompt on the Windows server, run the following:

START http://boxstarter.org/package/nr/url?https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bunchc/1d97b496aa1d6efe146f799b2fb34547/raw/51ebf18ca320c49c38e2f493e0ff4afad59bb0cd/domain_controller.ps1

Note: You may need to add boxstarter.org to trusted sites.

Once executing, it should look a bit like this: