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

Creating a dev container

To add a dev container to a project, we need to create a .devcontainer folder with two files:

  • Dockerfile to describe the container image to build and run
  • devcontainer.json to add additional configuration

This combination of files will give us a single-container configuration. Remote-Containers also supports a multi-container configuration using Docker Compose (see https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/create-dev-container#_using-docker-compose) but we will focus on the single-container scenario for this chapter.

The accompanying code for the book contains a sample project that we will use to explore dev containers. Ensure that you clone the code from https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Windows-Subsystem-for-Linux-2-WSL-2-Tips-Tricks-and-Techniques in a Linux distribution. Once the code is cloned, open the chapter-10/01-web-app folder in Visual Studio Code (there is also a chapter-10/02-web-app-completed folder with all of the steps...