⚠️ Note - This project is Deprecated, as Microsoft doesn't seem to support the VM downloads anymore ⚠️

ieup

Spin up IE & Edge VMs with one command

This is mostly for personal use, but there could be some useful aspects to it for others, so feel free to look around / clone / fork.

I've added answers to some common questions around this here

Huge thanks to this gist for providing a lot of the info that got winrm working.

Requirements

Virtualbox Virtualbox is used by vagrant to spin up the VM

• Get Virtualbox here

Vagrant

• Get Vagrant here

Initial setup

• Check the Vagrantfile for information on how to choose a specific VM from modern.ie. By default, win7-ie11 is used
• Run vagrant up
• The VM will begin downloading if it doesn't already exist (this may take a while)
• Your VM should be running with a GUI
• When prompted, choose 'work' for the network setting within the VM.
• Common vagrant commands can be seen here
• For information on setting up shared folders, see here

Running the VM

• Run vagrant up to run the VM currently selected
• Run vagrant status to see running VMs
• Run vagrant halt to stop the running VM
• Run vagrant suspend to stop the running VM, saving the current state (will resume from here on next vagrant up)
• Run vagrant destroy to remove the VM (useful if the VM needs spinning up from scratch again)

Choosing a VM

A list of available VMs can be viewed in ./vmList.rb. These can be used be setting the BOX_NAME env var to one of the 'keys' (the strings on the left of the list).

• Check the correct one is available / running with the vagrant status command

Accessing shared folders

note - This only needs to be done once, when initialising the VM (e.g. first time using it, or after a vagrant destroy)

• Run vagrant up
• Once running, open windows start menu and search local security policy
• Open Local Security Policy
• Go to the Network List Manager Policies folder
• Find the network entry, and change:
• Location type: 'private'
• User permissions: 'User can change location'
• Shut down the VM
• Run vagrant up again - this time, shared folders will be visible under 'Network'

Fully configuring winrm

These steps should be done after accessing shared folders

• If not already running, run vagrant up
• Navigate to Network > tools
• Run setup-winrm.bat as administrator
• Note - all winrm commands should be run as administrator

Adding chocolately & puppet

These steps should be done after accessing shared folders

• If not already running, run vagrant up
• Navigate to Network > tools
• Run setup-choco.bat as administrator

FAQ

Where are downloaded Vagrant boxes stored?

The VAGRANT_HOME env var can be used to configure the location that boxes will be downloaded to, however the default is:

• Mac OS X and Linux: ~/.vagrant.d/boxes
• Windows: C:/Users/USERNAME/.vagrant.d/boxes

How do I RDP into a running box?

Once a box is running & connected (you may need to follow the fully configuring winrm steps), you can access the box by:

• Run vagrant rdp
• This is supposed to bring up the default rdp client, but it doesn't work for me, so i just grab the credentials and manually add the box/s to my client.

How do I remove a vagrant box instance (but keep the downloaded box)?

Sometimes it's useful to start from scratch, and delete an instance of a box, without having to download the VM again when spinning it up.

This can be done by:

• Run vagrant global-status
• Find the name or ID of the box instance you want to remove
• Run vagrant destroy [ID/Name]

How do I delete a VM i've downloaded?

Boxes can be deleted by:

• Run vagrant global-status
• Find the name or ID of the box you want to delete
• Run vagrant box remove [ID/Name]

How do I set environment variables?

Environment variables (env vars) are used in this repo to configure which boxes are downloaded, & how.

On Mac / Linux To set env vars temporarily:

• Run export [variable name]="variable value"
• An example could be export BOX_NAME="win7-ie8"

To set env vars permanently (reccomended):

• Run cd ~
• Find .bash_profile
• Add export [variable name]="variable value" to the file
• An example could be export BOX_GUI="false"

On Windows Unfortunately i've not had to handle env vars on windows, so I can only defer to the official documentation here