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

Running Linux applications from Windows

In Chapter 2, Installing and Configuring the Windows Subsystem for Linux, you were briefly introduced to the wsl command and you saw how it could be used both for controlling running distros and for executing applications inside distros. In this section, we're going to dig deeper into running applications in distros with the wsl command.

As we saw in the last section, being able to access files across Windows and Linux is useful and being able to invoke applications builds on this further. WSL doesn't stop with just being able to run applications in a distro from Windows, it also lets you pipe output between applications. When building up scripts in either Windows or Linux, piping output between applications is a very common way to build up script functionality. Being able to pipe output between Windows and Linux commands allows you to build scripts that run across both Windows and Linux, which really helps build that sense of uniting...