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How to Manage IPSWs on your Corellium Appliance

There are two ways to manage IPSWs on your on-prem Appliance:

  1. In the setup.json, enable fallbackOriginalUrl. This will show and allow you to create devices using IPSW files that are on the internet. Running this command should enable that config and restart the neccessary services: 

    sed -i 's/"fallbackOriginalUrl":[[:space:]]*false/"fallbackOriginalUrl": true/' /etc/corellium/setup.json && corellium-configure --postinst
    note

    This will show beta iOS IPSWs which will not work on every Appliance. Attempting to build a beta device when your license does not support it will result in an error. You can easily identify a Beta since its buildID will end in a letter as opposed to a digit, e.g. 23C5027f.

    Creating devices using this method will download the IPSW from the internet (typically updates.cdn-apple.com or somewhere similar) each time you create that device+iOS combination, e.g. iPhone17Pro, 26.0.1. Since the IPSWs of these latest iOSs have reached sizes of 11GB, this will add to the device creation time, depending on the internet download speed available to your Appliance.

  2. Manually put IPSWs on the Appliance. If you only want to see IPSWs that exist locally on the Appliance, you'll want to set fallbackOriginalUrl to false. If you leave it as true, the system will show all available IPSWs both online and local, but it will use the local when available

    sed -i 's/"fallbackOriginalUrl":[[:space:]]*true/"fallbackOriginalUrl": false/' /etc/corellium/setup.json && corellium-configure --postinst

 

Downloading IPSWs​

In order to download IPSWs locally to the Appliance, you need to:

  1. Find the URL of the device+OS combination at https://ipsw.me/, copy the full link to that IPSW

  2. wget the IPSW on the Appliance to /tmp, for example:

    wget -O /tmp/iPhone18,1_26.1_23B85_Restore.ipsw https://updates.cdn-apple.com/2025FallFCS/fullrestores/089-13936/78E94D51-CAD3-45DF-BC13-CD7D2E6E6E8F/iPhone18,1_26.1_23B85_Restore.ipsw

  3. Once the download is complete, move the downloaded IPSW to /var/ipsw/imports, this might take a few minutes to copy the IPSW and then for the system to import it. 

    mv /tmp/iPhone18,1_26.1_23B85_Restore /var/ipsw/imports/iPhone18,1_26.1_23B85_Restore

  4. You will know that the import was completed once the /var/ipsw/imports directory is empty. You should now see iPhone18,1_26.1_23B85_Restore under /var/ipsw.

    note

    This is practice is only recommended if you normally use the same 10-15 device+iOS combination as it requires you to only download the IPSW once for each combination.

    The Appliance is limited in space so you will need to keep track of how many IPSWs you are storing locally. You can comfortably go up to 30 but after that it is recommended to start to keeping track of space and consider deleting the lesser used IPSWs from /var/ipsw.