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

Summary

In this chapter, you saw ways to improve how you work with Git in WSL. You saw how to configure Git Credential Manager for Windows to reuse saved Git credentials from Windows in WSL and to prompt you in Windows when new Git credentials are needed. After this, you saw a range of options for viewing Git history, with a discussion of their pros and cons to enable you to pick the right approach for you.

In the rest of the chapter, you saw how to work with JSON data in WSL, initially by diving into jq and the JSON capabilities of PowerShell. With this background, you then saw some examples of working with JSON through deployments using az and kubectl. As well as covering scenarios that you may face with each of these CLIs, the examples demonstrated techniques that can be applied to other CLIs (or APIs) that provide JSON data. Being able to work effectively with JSON data gives you powerful capabilities that you can use in your scripts to save you time.

This is the final chapter...