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

Configuring and controlling WSL

The previous section briefly mentioned the wsl command, which is the most common way to interact with and control WSL. In this section, you will learn how you can interactively control WSL using the wsl command, as well as how to change the behavior of WSL by modifying settings in the wsl.conf configuration file.

Important note

Earlier builds of WSL provided a wslconfig.exe utility. If you see any references to this in documentation or articles, don't worry – all the functionality of wslconfig.exe (and more) is available in the wsl command that you will see in the following sections.

The commands and configuration in the following section will give you the tools you need to control running distros in WSL and configure the behavior of the distros (and WSL as a whole) to suit your requirements.

Introducing the wsl command

The wsl command gives you a way to control and interact with WSL and installed Linux distros, such as running...