How do you debug Django sites using Win 7 XP Mode?

Question

I am developing a Django site using Windows 7 as my dev environment. I have IE6 running through XP mode. Accessing my site through localhost:8000 doesn't work in IE6 (probably since it is still running a VM). Is there a way to access my site in IE6 while it is being served through Django's test server running on Windows 7?

Answer 1

When running the Django runserver on one machine ,but accessing it from another (or Virtual Machine in your case), be sure to:

a) Have the django test server bind to an address that IE6 in the VM can access. To do this, run the server with:

$ python manage.py runserver 192.168.x.x:8000

b) Visit that explicit address and port in IE. For IE6, be sure to specify the 'http' protocol as IE6 doesn't like IP addresses without a protocol:

http://192.168.x.x:8000/

The reason for this is that, inside the VM, localhost or 127.0.0.1 (the defaults for runserver) refer to the virtual machine's IP address space. If using IE6 to test, you want to refer to the host OS, so use an absolute IP address that the client VM can address. There is some documentation on this from the django project, and rest assured this is a common enough need that we all do it - testing multiple variants of IE in a virtual machine seems to be a fact of life :-)

If you are still having troubles, be sure you have determined whether you're using NAT or bridged networking for your client VM as this controls the IP address, OS firewall restrictions (if any), and other avenues for communicating between a VM client and host.

Answer 2

your VM and the server running django are in two separate containers, and you can't access django app using localhost since Django is not installed on the VM. but what you can do is install IE tester http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage] in windows 7 to test all versions of IE.