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 have seen the ways in which WSL allows us to interop with Linux distros from Windows, starting with accessing the Linux file system via the \\wsl$\... path. You also saw how to call Linux applications from Windows and that you can chain Windows and Linux commands together by piping output between them, just as you would normally in either system. Finally, you saw that WSL forwards localhost requests to web servers running inside WSL distros. This allows you to easily develop and run web applications in WSL and test them from the browser in Windows.

Being able to access the file systems for your WSL distros and execute commands in them from Windows really helps to bring the two systems together, and it helps you pick your preferred tools for the tasks you are working on, regardless of which operating system they are in. In the next chapter, we will explore the capabilities for interacting with Windows from inside a WSL distro.