🛠 Internet Explorer Debugging
Let's start with the good news: Microsoft finally dropped the support for Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10[1], and even better Google Chrome has become the most popular browser[2].
Despite the great news, you might still need to test and debug your application on good old IE.
Most of you probably already have a great local debugging environment using Parallels, VMware or VirtualBox with different operating system and browser combinations. Providing dozen of different Internet Explorer versions, to workaround IE madness.
This Post is for those of you, who don't have such a setup or want to automate theirs. All you need is Vagrant, VirtualBox and a Vagrantfile configured to provision different Microsoft VMs.
Prerequisites
Please make sure that you've installed and properly configured the following software:
Vagrantfile
Download the following Vagrantfile to provision IE VMs that use the host DNS resolver and proxy configuration.
It additionally supports the provisioning of the guests hostfile, so that you don't need to fiddle with system settings if you just want to crackdown a bug.
https://github.com/orlandohohmeier/vagrant-ie
Start, Stop, Destroy
Use the following command to download, create and provision your debugging environments.
$ vagrant up ${environment}
Available environments: vista-ie7, w7-ie8, w7-ie10, w7-ie11, w8-ie10, w8.1-ie11, w10-edge
Use the following command to stop/halt the environment.
$ vagrant halt ${environment}
If you want to start over, use the following command to shut down the running environment and destroy all resources created during the machine creation process.
$ vagrant destroy ${environment}
BTW: This helps to get rid of the annoying expired warning.
For a full list of commands and vagrant options, please see:
https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/cli/index.html