Craig Wilhite

Automatically Configuring WSL

February 7th, 2018

Beginning with Insider Build 17093, we added a method for you to automatically configure certain functionality in WSL that will be applied every time you launch the subsystem. This includes automount options and network configuration. We're introducing a file called wsl.conf to handle these configurations. For example, we released a blog ...

Windows/WSL Interop with AF_UNIX

February 7th, 2018

Starting in Windows Insider build 17093, a WSL application can communicate with a Windows application over Unix sockets. Back in December, we blogged about bringing AF_UNIX to Windows. Now, we're building on that functionality. Consider a requirement where you want to run some kind of service as a Windows application. Additionally, you would ...

Chmod/Chown WSL Improvements

January 12th, 2018

We've added new file system features to WSL in Insider Build 17063. You can now set the owner and group of files using chmod/chown and modify read/write/execute permissions in WSL. You can also create special files like fifos, unix sockets, and device files. We're introducing new mounting options with DrvFs for projecting permissions onto ...

Share Environment Vars between WSL and Windows

December 22nd, 2017

Hey WSL users—we have more features to share with you! Our latest Windows Insider build lets you share environment variables between WSL and Windows. Starting with Build 17063, let’s look at how you can leverage the new “WSLENV” to enhance environmental variable interop between Win32/WSL. Summary For the pros who’ve already heard ...

[Cross Post] WSL Interoperability with Docker

December 8th, 2017

We frequently get asked about running docker from within the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). We don’t support running the docker daemon directly in WSL. But what you can do is call in to the daemon running under Windows from WSL. What does this let you do? You can create dockerfiles, build them, and run them in the daemon—Windows or ...

A Guide to Invoking WSL

November 28th, 2017

There are a variety of ways to invoke the Windows Subsystem for Linux from Windows commandlines and they all behave a little differently. Let’s get to the bottom of it.    “wsl” The first (and recommended!) method will start up your default distro. Additionally, it starts the distro in the current working directory where you invoke ...