Offline SharePoint 2013 Prerequisites installation on Windows Server 2012

When I was at a customer recently, I had that nice situation of a Windows Server 2012 without an active internet connection. Before you can install SharePoint 2013, you need to execute the “prerequisiteinstaller.exe”. The only problem with this is the fact that you do need to have an internet connection. A while ago, I made a similar post like this one about “Installing SharePoint 2010 prerequisites offline“. In this post, I will guide you trough a very easy way to get your SharePoint 2013 prerequisites installed on a Windows Server 2012. First of all, the problem you will have is:

To solution is quite easy. All you have to download are the PowerShell files provided by Craig Lussier, which you can download from TechNet (where you also have a detailed description of the PowerShell files).

Download the files

First step is to download all the required files from a machine with an active internet connection. Create folder on your machine like “C:\SP2013Prerequisites”. Next, open a PowerShell prompt, and execute the file “Download-SP2013PreReqFiles.ps1“. The script will now ask you where to save the downloads. Provide the folder you just created. When the downloads are ready, you should see:

Install the files

Second part is to install the files. First, you need to get the SharePoint 2013 installation media files on a local directory. When you have the SharePoint 2013 Server IMG file, you can double-click to mount it to your machine. Once mounted, you can copy this to a local folder like “C:\SP2013”. When you have a SharePoint Foundation 2013 installation file (in the form of an exe), you can also unpack it using the command:

SharePointFoundation.exe /extract:"C:\SP2013"

Next:

1. Copy the downloaded Prerequisite files into the “c:\SP2013\prerequisiteinstallerfiles” directory of your Windows Server 2012 server.
2. Run PowerShell as Administrator (right click on the PowerShell Tile and select “Run as Administrator“)
3. Run the script “Install-SP2013PreReqFiles.ps1“. When you run this on a fresh Windows Server 2012, you will receive the following error. You can fix this by changing the “Execution Policy” to “RemoteSigned

Try again, and you should now get a question where the SharePoint 2013 installation files are stored. Provide the path and press enter. the SharePoint 2013 Product Preparation Tool will now popup. (in fact, the PowerShell script did a call to “prerequisiteinstaller.exe” including the path to the downloaded components). Click next until the server needs a reboot. This reboot is required because the installer will change/add some Windows Server 2012 features.

When your server is up and running again, it will pop-up the Product Preparation tool again. Just cancel it! You need to execute the previous Powershell script again. So run the script “Install-SP2013PreReqFiles.ps1” and provide the path to the installation media. It will now install the other prerequisites and finally require one last restart.

That’s it! Ready for the SharePoint 2013 installation, but just one more thing:

You can of course download the components individually, and install them manually by executing each installer one by one. This will work just find, except one component: Windows Server AppFabric. You really need to get it installed using the Product Preparation tool (via PowerShell), otherwise you will get a nice error that AppFabric is not installed correctly to be used with sharePoint. Been there! If you want to install AppFabric manually, you can use : “prerequisiteinstaller.exe /AppFabric:prerequisiteinstallerfiles\WindowsServerAppFabricSetup_x64”. This way, it will install correctly