How to setup WSL, and how to use it

This post will present the necessary steps in order to setup Window Subsystem for Linux, and provide some use cases for using WSL in your development environment. You can read more about WSL here

Setup WSL

To setup WSL on your in Windows machine, follow the official documentation maintained by Microsoft.

Install Windows Terminal

Windows has a new terminal app that makes it easier to work with command line/shell, and allows you to easily switch between Linux and either command line or PowerShell sessions.

Test the setup

After being done setting up WSL and have installed Windows Terminal, run the Windows Terminal application and select your installed distro which you installed while setting up WSL.

When you run Windows Terminal , you usually start at your mounted Windows user profile folder /mnt/c/Users/{UserName}.

In order to go to the root of your WSL distro type cd in Windows Terminal.

Let's test our setup by installing a very important package🚂😉

1. On your terminal input the following : sudo apt-get install sl
2. Enter your password if asked.
3. Run the command sl on your terminal.
4. Enjoy the result 😄

Basic Linux commands.

In the previous sections I told you to type cd and sudo apt-get install sl , but what does these commands mean ?

• Let's start with the first command cd, it's the way to navigate within our Linux filesystem.

  • cd : Send you to the home folder.

  • cd .. : Moves you one directory up.

  • cd - : Moves you to the previous directory.

• Next command we wrote was sudo apt-get install sl, this command consist of the following Linux command:

  • sudo : Is short for "SuperUser Do", this command enables you to perform tasks that require administrative or root permissions. However it's not recommended to use this command, unless you are 100% sure what you are doing.

  • apt-get : Is the packaging system used by Debian Linux, just like nuget package management for .NET or NPM(node package manager) for Node.js.

  • apt-get install sl : We pass the option install and the name of the package, which in this case is sl

But was does sl mean? 🤔
Let's continue and I'll explain at the end of this section😉

• ls : Is used to list the content of the current directory

  • ls -R : Will list all the files in the sub-directories as well.

  • ls -a : Will show all the hidden files.

  • ls al : Will list all the files and directories with detailed information as their current permission, owners, size and etc.

• mkdir <directoryName> : Makes a new directory in the file system.

• touch file.txt : Creates a new file in the current directory.

• cat file.txt : Reads the file.

• vim file.txt : Edit the file with Vim
  - To exit Vim editor:
  1. Press Esc.
  2. you should see the --INSERT-- label disappear from the lower left corner.
  3. To save your changes before exiting type :w and then type :q, or to exit just type :q.

• code file.txt : Edit the file with Visual Studio Code CLI

So what does sl mean then?

We'll nothing basically , it's a fun package that plays with the notion that you sometimes may mistype the listing command ls for sl instead😅. Which normally would give you and error, but now give you a 🚂🚋🚋 on your terminal 😄 .

You can remove the sl package by running the following command :
sudo apt-get remove sl.

Written: 2021-03-18