In the current study, an immersed boundary method for simulating cavitating flows with complex or moving boundaries is presented, which follows the discrete direct forcing approach. Although the immersed boundary methods are widely used in various applications of single phase, multiphase, and particulate flows, either incompressible or compressible, and numerous alternative formulations exist, to the best of the authors' knowledge, a handful of computational works employ such methodologies on cavitating flows. The herein proposed method, following previous works of the author's group, tries to fill this gap and to solidify the development of a computational tool of a simple formulation capable to tackle complex numerical problems of cavitation modeling. The method aims to be used in a wide range of applications of industrial interest and treat flows of engineering scales. Therefore, a validation of the method is performed by numerous benchmark test‐cases, of progressively increasing complexity, from incompressible low Reynolds number to compressible and highly turbulent cavitating flows.