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 4: Windows to Linux Interoperability

In Chapter 1, Introduction to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, we compared the WSL experience to running Linux in a virtual machine; where virtual machines are focused around isolation, WSL has strong interoperability built in between Windows and Linux. In this chapter, you will start to be introduced to these capabilities, starting with interacting with files and applications running under WSL and files from the Windows host environment. This will include looking at how to pipe output between scripts running in Windows and WSL. After this, we will look at how WSL enables web applications in Linux to be accessed from Windows.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

  • Accessing Linux files from Windows
  • Running Linux applications from Windows
  • Accessing Linux web applications from Windows

Let's get started!