For testing purposes it's handy to have a VM of your OS of choice on your developer machine. When testing with Mac OSX, VirtualBox can be used as a free alternative to VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop.

You following things:

  • create Apple-ID if not yet done
  • download Mac OSX 10.10 Yosemite in App Store
  • install iesd Ruby Gem:
gem install iesd
  • create OS install image usable for VirtualBox:
iesd -i /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app -o Desktop/Mac_OSX_Yosemite.dmg -t BaseSystem
  • create new VM in VirtualBox:
  • select type 'Mac OS X', version 'Mac OS X (64 bit)'
  • create at least 20 GB harddisk
  • give at least 2 GB of RAM, 2 CPUs, 64 MB of video memory
  • select Mac_OSX_Yosemite.dmg as CD/DVD image
  • boot VM, partition disk and install OS
  • now we have a base image for testing