Overview

Microsoft provides virtual machine disk images to facilitate website testing in multiple versions of IE, regardless of the host operating system. With a single command, you can have IE8, IE9, IE10, IE11 and MSEdge running in separate virtual machines. Each virtual machine comes with the selected version of IE already installed. IE11 machines can be selected with Windows 7 or Windows 8.1.

The original script works as it originally did, with hard-coded urls and md5 values. The 'ievms-node' script uses Node to hit the Microsoft API and grab the current correct url and md5 hashes. This version should be a little more future-proof, but obviously requires having Node installed.

This is a hacked on fork that has been altered to work with the currently available versions and URLs for the VMs on Microsoft's site. The original repo can be found here. The linked pledgie is for the original author.

Known Issues

• IE11 - Win81 MD5 URL is dead, and I'm unable to determine a working one. MD5 has been temporarily hard-coded as a workaround.

Quickstart

Just paste this into a terminal:

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/amichaelparker/ievms/master/ievms.sh | bash

or:

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/amichaelparker/ievms/master/ievms-node.sh | bash

Requirements

• VirtualBox > 5.0 (http://virtualbox.org), select 'command line utilities' during installation
• Curl (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install curl)
• Linux Only: unar (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install unar) (Might need this for Mac as well)
• Node (Recommended)
• Patience

NOTE Use ievms version 0.2.1 for VirtualBox < 5.0.

Installation

1.) Install VirtualBox and check the Requirements

2.) Download and unpack ievms:

• To install IE versions 8, 9, 10, 11 and EDGE use:

  curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/amichaelparker/ievms/master/ievms-node.sh | bash

• To install specific IE versions (IE8, IE9 and EDGE only for example) use:

  curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/amichaelparker/ievms/master/ievms-node.sh | env IEVMS_VERSIONS="8 9 EDGE" bash

3.) Launch Virtual Box.

4.) Choose ievms image from Virtual Box.

The OVA images are massive and can take hours or tens of minutes to download, depending on the speed of your internet connection. You might want to start the install and then go catch a movie, or maybe dinner, or both.

Recovering from a failed installation

Each version is installed into ~/.ievms/ (or INSTALL_PATH). If the installation fails for any reason (corrupted download, for instance), delete the appropriate ZIP/ova file and rerun the install.

If nothing else, you can delete ~/.ievms (or INSTALL_PATH) and rerun the install.

Specifying the install path

To specify where the VMs are installed, use the INSTALL_PATH variable:

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/amichaelparker/ievms/master/ievms.sh | env INSTALL_PATH="/Path/to/.ievms" bash

Passing additional options to curl

The curl command is passed any options present in the CURL_OPTS environment variable. For example, you can set a download speed limit:

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

Disk requirements

A full ievms install will require approximately 69G:

Servo:.ievms amichaelparker$ du -ch *
 11G    IE10 - Win7-disk1.vmdk
 22M    IE10-Windows6.1-x86-en-us.exe
 11G    IE11 - Win7-disk1.vmdk
 28M    IE11-Windows6.1-x86-en-us.exe
1.5G    IE6 - WinXP-disk1.vmdk
724M    IE6 - WinXP.ova
717M    IE6_WinXP.zip
1.6G    IE7 - WinXP-disk1.vmdk
 15M    IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe
1.6G    IE8 - WinXP-disk1.vmdk
 16M    IE8-WindowsXP-x86-ENU.exe
 11G    IE9 - Win7-disk1.vmdk
4.7G    IE9 - Win7.ova
4.7G    IE9_Win7.zip
 10G    MSEdge - Win10-disk1.vmdk
5.1G    MSEdge - Win10.ova
5.0G    MSEdge_Win10.zip
3.4M    ievms-control-0.3.0.iso
4.6M    lsar
4.5M    unar
4.1M    unar1.5.zip
 69G    total

You may remove all files except *.vmdk after installation and they will be re-downloaded if ievms is run again in the future:

$ find ~/.ievms -type f ! -name "*.vmdk" -exec rm {} \;

If all installation related files are removed, around 47G is required:

Servo:.ievms amichaelparker$ du -ch *
 11G    IE10 - Win7-disk1.vmdk
 11G    IE11 - Win7-disk1.vmdk
1.5G    IE6 - WinXP-disk1.vmdk
1.6G    IE7 - WinXP-disk1.vmdk
1.6G    IE8 - WinXP-disk1.vmdk
 11G    IE9 - Win7-disk1.vmdk
 10G    MSEdge - Win10-disk1.vmdk
 47G    total

Bandwidth requirements

A full installation will download roughly 12.5G of data.

Features

Clean Snapshot

A snapshot is automatically taken upon install, allowing rollback to the pristine virtual environment configuration. Anything can go wrong in Windows and rather than having to worry about maintaining a stable VM, you can simply revert to the clean snapshot to reset your VM to the initial state.

Guest Control

VirtualBox guest additions are installed after each virtual machine is created (and before the clean snapshot) and the appropriate steps are taken to enable guest control from the host machine.

Resuming Downloads

If one of the comically large files fails to download, the curl command used will automatically attempt to resume where it left off. Unfortunately, the modern.IE download servers do not support resume.

Reusing Win7 VMs

Currently there exists a bug in VirtualBox (or possibly elsewhere) that disables guest control after a Windows 8 virtual machine's state is saved. To better support guest control and to eliminate yet another image download, ievms will re-use the IE9 Win7 image for IE10 and IE11 by default. In addition, the Win7 VMs are the only ones which can be successfully "rearmed" to extend the activation period.

NOTE: If you'd like to disable Win7 VM reuse for IE10, set the environment variable REUSE_WIN7 to anything other than yes:

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/amichaelparker/ievms/master/ievms.sh | REUSE_WIN7="no" bash

NOTE: IE10 uses Win7 by default in this fork, and IE11 can use Win7 or Win81 based on the 'REUSE_WIN7' flag. It currently defaults to 'no', installing with Win81.

Acknowledgements

• modern.IE - Provider of IE VM images.
• ntpasswd - Boot disk starting point and registry editor.
• regit-config - Minimal Virtualbox kernel config reference.
• uck - Used to (re)master control ISO.

License

None. (To quote Morrissey, "take it, it's yours")