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

Installing Remote-Containers

To use the Remote-Containers extension, you will need it installed, and you will also need to have Docker installed and accessible in WSL. See Chapter 7, Working with Containers in WSL, the Installing and using Docker with WSL section for how to configure this. If you already have Docker Desktop installed, ensure that it is configured to use the WSL 2-based engine. The WSL 2 engine uses a Docker daemon running in WSL 2, so your code files (from WSL 2) can be mounted directly in your containers, without going through the Linux-to-Windows file share. This direct mounting gives you better performance, ensures that file events are handled correctly, and uses the same file cache (see this blog post for more details: https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-desktop-wsl-2-best-practices/).

Once you have Docker configured, the next step is to install the Remote-Containers extension. You can do this by searching for Remote-Containers in the EXTENSIONS view in Visual...