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

Adding custom profiles

Windows Terminal does a great job of automatically discovering PowerShell installations and WSL distributions to populate your profile list with (and updates it when new distributions are installed). This is a good start, but in addition to launching an interactive shell, a profile can launch specific applications within a profile (as the last section showed with htop). In this section, we'll look at a couple of examples, but the main purpose of them is to show ideas beyond just launching shells to give inspiration for how you might customize your Windows Terminal configuration.

If you have a machine that you regularly connect to via SSH, then you can smooth your workflow by creating a Windows Terminal profile that launches directly into SSH. Open your settings from the profile dropdown (or by pressing Ctrl + ,) and add a profile in the list section under profiles:

{
    "guid": "{9b0583cb-f2ef-4c16-bcb5-9111cdd626f3...