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

Working with JSON

Automating complex tasks can save hours of manual toil. In this section, we'll explore some techniques for working with JSON data, which is a common format that many command-line tools and APIs allow you to use. Later in the chapter, we'll show some examples of how you can use these techniques to easily create and publish content to a cloud website or Kubernetes cluster.

For this section, there is a sample JSON file in the accompanying code for the book. You can clone this code with Git from https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Windows-Subsystem-for-Linux-2-WSL-2-Tips-Tricks-and-Techniques. The sample JSON is called wsl-book.json and is in the chapter-11/02-working-with-json folder, and is based around a JSON description of the chapters and headings for a book. A snippet of this JSON is shown here:

{
    "title": "WSL: Tips, Tricks and Techniques",
    "parts": [
   ...