ievms – Easily bring up IE browsers on any environment with Vagrant and VirtualBox

Thinking about incorporating IE browser testing for your site, but unsure how to proceed given that you’re developing on a macOS or Linux environment? Do you want to bring up a Windows virtual machine with something like VirtualBox, but not sure how to grab a valid Windows license? Luckily, Microsoft is aware of how difficult it is to develop and test for Edge and IE browsers, so they have released free virtual machines that already have these browsers built in.

If you go to the Microsoft developer website above, you have the options of downloading these VM images for different virtualization softwares (for e.g. VirtualBox and VMWare). However, these steps still feel pretty manual. I wanted to have a simple set of instructions that I could pass around to folks on my team to do IE testing with. Ideally, it would just be a script that anyone can run from any development environment. Thankfully, Microsoft also made vagrant images available, so I was able to create a simple wrapper around this.

ievms – a simple way to start IE and Edge VMs with Vagrant and Virtual Box

Vagrant is a developer tool that allows you to create automated and reproducible development environment using virtual machines. It works pretty well with VirtualBox, a free and well-supported virtualizer.

ievms relies on vagrant, VirtualBox and the images provided Microsoft to create a simple workflow for managing IE browsers across different Windows versions.

Bringing up a Windows 10 virtual machine with IE 10 installed and ready to use:

:; vagrant up ie10-win7

This will download the image if it’s not installed, add it to vagrant, and then bring up the virtual machine with a graphical UI. Once you’re done testing, you can suspend the machine with vagrant suspend ie10-win7, or remove it completely with vagrant destroy ie10-win7. Even if you removed it, the next time you need to bring it up, the image is already cached locally, so you will not have to wait for the download again.

In addition to IE10 on Windows 7, other browser-platform combinations are supported by default:
– ie6-xp
– ie8-xp
– ie7-vista
– ie8-win7
– ie9-win7
– ie10-win7
– ie11-win7
– ie10-win8
– ie11-win81
– msedge-win10

Bonus: You can also test a local website that’s running on the host development environment. For example, if you have a site running on port 8080 locally, you can reach it from within the virtual machine by going to http://192.168.33.1:8080.

Check out ievms‘s README for more instruction on how to get started.

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