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

Installing and using Docker with WSL

The traditional approach to running Docker on a Windows machine is to use Docker Desktop (https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop), which will create and manage a Linux VM for you and run the Docker service as a daemon in that VM. The downside of this is that the VM takes time to start up and has to pre-allocate enough memory to accommodate running various containers for you.

With WSL2, it became possible to install and run the standard Linux Docker daemon inside a WSL distribution (distro). This had the benefits of starting up more quickly and consuming a smaller amount of memory on startup, and only increasing the memory consumption when you run containers. The downside was that you had to install and manage the daemon yourself.

Fortunately, there is now a third option, which is to install Docker Desktop and enable the WSL backend. With this approach, you keep the convenience of Docker Desktop from an installation and management perspective...