Web development testing on IE

One of the things every web developer needs to do (sooner or later) is to test his website/webapp in some IE flavor. This is a pain for any Mac, Linux or even Windows user.

For Windows users there are some friendly tools to emulate several IEs, but I've seen that not always work as expected...

Anyway, my favorite way (on Mac OS X) is to use ievms github project which allow you to download the version you need and start testing it.

The README has all the information you need, but just to save you a click or two, start by downloading and installing VirtualBox.

While you do that, start downloading the stacks you need, based on your requirements.

All versions of IE:

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | bash

A specific version, e.g. IE8:

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="8" bash

If you prefer to pass a list of the versions you want, e.g. I normally use IE9 and IE10 for webapps, you can do it with:

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="9 10" bash

If you don't want to blow up your bandwidth you can also limit it by passing an options like:

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | env CURL_OPTS="--limit-rate 50k" bash

Run the VM after the download is complete. The default Windows admin password is Password1, it’s also the password hint within the VM should you forget it.