Robert SheddBlogging about the business, technology, and life of startups

Supporting Internet Explorer for your web app is a pain. At least, trying to test your Ruby on Rails (or other localhost-based site) in IE while developing on the Mac should be easy, given the prevalence of virtual machines. Right?? You’d think. However, trying to setup our front-end developer to access a local instance of Passenger running on Mac OS X from a Windows VM proved to be more of an issue than it needed to be. Adding to this, most of the top Google results for relevant keywords for this configuration made the process more overly difficult than it needed to be.

So, to help ease your pain in testing your Mac-based Rails site from a Windows virtual machine, here is an easy configuration for the three main VMs.

We need to do two main things:

1. Trying to serve port-based or subdomain-based sites over to the Windows VM is going to be more challenging. Let’s make things easy – we’ll set the default http://localhost site for our Mac to our Rails site.
2. We need to get the VM’s network to communicate with the Mac’s network correctly so that we can access this site.

On my team, we’re using Passenger on the Mac (running on top of the Mac’s base install of Apache). We’re using Passenger Pane to configure Apache easily. We also have this hooked into RVM, but that won’t be relevant to what we’re doing here. For the purposes of this post, I’ll assume that you have Passenger successfully serving a site that you can access via http://somedomain.local I’ll also assume that for whichever VM you’re opting to use, you have Windows installed and running in it.

** Do yourself a favor. Make sure that VM Ware Tools, Parallel Tools, or VirtualBox Guest Additions are installed – this ensures that the network connectivity will work as expected.

Let’s get http://localhost serving our Rails site

At the bottom of /etc/apache2/httpd.conf when using Passenger Pane, you’ll find the following configuration:

<IfModule passenger_module>
  NameVirtualHost *:80
  <VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName _default_
  </VirtualHost>
  Include /private/etc/apache2/passenger_pane_vhosts/*.conf
</IfModule>

To make our Passenger site the default localhost site, go into passenger_pane_vhosts/, view the Apache config file for the site you want to be the default, and you’ll see something along the lines of the following:

$ cat yoursite.local.vhost.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName yoursite.local
  DocumentRoot "/Users/username/rails/yoursite/public"
  RackEnv development
  <Directory "/Users/username/rails/yoursite/public">
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Copy the lines from inside the VirtualHost block and paste them back into /etc/apache2/httpd.conf so that it looks like the following:

$ cd ..
$ sudo mate httpd.conf
# Added by the Passenger preference pane
# Make sure to include the Passenger configuration (the LoadModule,
# PassengerRoot, and PassengerRuby directives) before this section.
<IfModule passenger_module>
  NameVirtualHost *:80
  <VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName _default_
	####
	DocumentRoot "/Users/username/rails/yoursite/public"
	RackEnv development
	<Directory "/Users/username/rails/yoursite/public">
	  Order allow,deny
	  Allow from all
	</Directory>
	####
  </VirtualHost>
  Include /private/etc/apache2/passenger_pane_vhosts/*.conf
</IfModule>

Restart Apache by going to System Preferences > Sharing and uncheck & recheck Web Sharing.

Also, if you’re using VMWare Fusion or Parallels, note the IP address that’s shown here.

Configuring VirtualBox

Let’s start with Virtual Box, which was the biggest pain to configure. Not because there’s a lot of work, but because they one critical detail doesn’t seem to be well known (most of the posts you’ll read online try to guide you through using the command-line network configuration tool). I should note that this was my first real opportunity to use Virtual Box, having only used Parallels and VMWare Fusion beforehand. It’s a little rough around the edges in a few places, but overall very impressive.

1) First, ensure that network settings for VirtualBox should be set to NAT – no port forwarding needed

2) Now, here’s what took a while to dig up: VirtualBox connects http://10.0.2.2 to the Mac’s localhost (thanks to this forum post) That is, just typing that into IE within the VM should connect you to http://localhost running on the Mac.

Configuring Parallels

1) For Parallels, you want to make sure that your VM is running on a Shared Network.

2) If you’re setup with this network configuration, you should be able to directly access the local IP address of your Mac, as shown in the System Preferences > Sharing screen:

Configuring VMWare Fusion

1) VMWare Fusion is much like Parallels. Configure your VM to “Share the Mac’s network connection” via NAT.

2) If you’re setup with this network configuration, you should be able to directly access the local IP address of your Mac, as shown in the System Preferences > Sharing screen, as with Parallels.

Hopefully, if you’ve made it to this point, for your respective VM, you have IE accessing your Passenger-based site. Success!

Hopefully, at least now you’ll be able to spend your time on all of the issues that poor users confined to IE are suffering through and get bug fixing quickly.