Lightest way to run IIS on Mac?

Question

I have an ASP.NET MVC 4 app that I would like to run on a Mac machine. I would hate to run a full blown Windows virtual machine when all I really need is IIS7 to run the MVC

Answer 1

I recently used VirtualBox with a copy of windows home (free with "I don't have key") and installed visual studio on it (community version). And IIS Express works just fine, TFS repos work too.

Answer 2

Follow this link (provided by @LexLi in a comment above) to know how to set up your MVC environment.

With regards to IIS, as far as I know it cannot be done. You should use the native web server of your operating system. IIS doesn't run on Mac, so I guess you should try Apache, and then install module "mod_mono".

Or if that gets too hairy, just use the standalone mono web server called XSP.

Or run FastCGI, or nginx.

It is all explained here: http://www.mono-project.com/ASP.NET

Answer 3

Xsp is a alternative for IIS in Mac, that can run basic capabilities.

Answer 4

I use Parallels, and although their software was poor a few years back, it's now lightyears ahead of VMWare in stability and performance. Parallels Desktop 7 for mac is awesome.

My only computer is a MBP, yet I develop software for IIS. I run Parallels in Coherence mode, and I essentially have VisualStudio as just another mac app. And since I'm only running one app in the VM, it's way more stable than a normal PC install. I actually haven't rebooted it in 2 months so far!

Only caveat - you want to dedicate 2-4GB of ram to the VM to prevent paging, so you should try to get more than 8GB if you're a polyglot developer. Having multiple IDEs on multiple OSes can be heavy, and when you add the memory-hogging yet blazingly fast Chrome to the mix, you'll hit that ram limit often...