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 a container with Docker

As was mentioned earlier, Docker gives us a standardized way of packaging up a container image. These container images can be shared through Docker registries, and Docker Hub (https://hub.docker.com/) is a commonly used registry for publicly available images. In this section, we will run a container with the nginx web server using the docker run -d --name docker-nginx -p 8080:80 nginx command as follows:

$ docker run -d --name docker-nginx -p 8080:80 nginx
Unable to find image 'nginx:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/nginx
8559a31e96f4: Already exists
1cf27aa8120b: Downloading [======================>                            ]  11.62MB/26.34MB
...

The last part of the command we just ran tells Docker what container image we want to run (nginx). This snippet of output shows...