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

Introducing Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a free, cross-platform, open source code editor from Microsoft. Out of the box, it comes with support for JavaScript (and TypeScript) applications, but support for a wide range of languages (including C++, Java, PHP, Python, Go, C#, and SQL) is available as extensions. Let's begin by installing Visual Studio Code.

To install Visual Studio Code, go to https://code.visualstudio.com/, click on the download link, and run the installer when it has downloaded. The install process is fairly straightforward, but if you want any more details (including how to install the Insiders version, which provides nightly builds), see https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/setup-overview.

Once installed, launching Visual Studio Code will present a window like this:

Figure 9.1 – A screenshot of Visual Studio Code

In this screenshot, you can see the Welcome page in Visual Studio Code. This page gives links...