Book Image

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

By : Stuart Leeks
Book Image

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

By: Stuart Leeks

Overview of this book

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) allows you to run native Linux tools alongside traditional Windows applications. Whether you’re developing applications across multiple operating systems or looking to add more tools to your Windows environment, WSL offers endless possibilities. You’ll start by understanding what WSL is and learn how to install and configure WSL along with different Linux distros. Next, you'll learn techniques that allow you to work across both Windows and Linux environments. You’ll discover how to install and customize the new Windows Terminal. We'll also show you how to work with code in WSL using Visual Studio Code (VS Code). In addition to this, you’ll explore how to work with containers with Docker and Kubernetes, and how to containerize a development environment using VS Code. While Microsoft has announced support for GPU and GUI applications in an upcoming release of WSL, at the time of writing these features are either not available or only in early preview releases. This book focuses on the stable, released features of WSL and giving you a solid understanding of the amazing techniques that you can use with WSL today. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to configure WSL and Windows Terminal to suit your preferences, and productively use Visual Studio Code for developing applications with WSL.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction, Installation, and Configuration
5
Section 2:Windows and Linux – A Winning Combination
11
Section 3: Developing with the Windows Subsystem for Linux

Chapter 10: Visual Studio Code and Containers

In Chapter 9, Visual Studio Code and WSL, we saw how the Visual Studio Code editor allows the user interface to be separated from other functionality that interacts with our code and runs it. With WSL, this allows us to keep the familiar Windows-based user interface while running all the key parts of our project in Linux. In addition to allowing the code interactions to run in a server component in WSL, Visual Studio Code also allows us to connect to the code server via SSH or to run it in a container. The ability to run in a container is provided by the Remote-Containers extension, and this chapter will focus on how we can use this functionality. We will see how we can use these development containers (or dev container) to encapsulate our project dependencies. By doing this, we make it easier to onboard people to our projects and gain an elegant way to isolate potentially conflicting toolsets between projects.

In this chapter, we&apos...