The Simple Linux Interface for DEveloping on WSL (Slide Whistle!)
SlideWSL is a web application platform for Windows featuring a containerized development environment with support for Docker Swarm deployment.
The development environment runs on WSL2 and is installed using just a single DOS batch file that runs from CMD without user interaction 1.
A sparse virtual hard disk image is mounted into the instance (using qemu-img in the qcow2 format); this can be disconnected, backed up, the WSL2 instance rebuilt, and then reattached without loss of project files.
A lightweight XFCE desktop is accessible by connecting to localhost from a remote desktop client.
The particular dev environment included here is an opinionated stack using nginx, Angular (with server-side rendering support), PHP/Laravel, KeyDB, MySQL, and phpMyAdmin. Customizations can be easily applied through a script that syncs the SlideWSL repo and ./local folders from the host to the WSL2 instance.
Containers are managed by Docker Compose with YAML files that are generated using Go Templates. These templates are used to create configurations for both local and Swarm deployable environments.
A lightweight staging container is included with its own Docker Engine. By placing this in Swarm mode, and pulling from a local registry, we can simulate and test deployments on the developer machine.
In order to give the developer full control, this project aims to provision the WSL2 distro on-demand and build all images locally. Because of this, things will be slow until the build cache is produced and a lot of disk space will be necessary.
SlideWSL is still in an early stage. There is currently no macOS support, pipeline integrations, or service health checks. The documentation is lacking and often out-of-date. And, finally, most commands are still done through direct use of the Docker CLI.
See NOTES for details, and CHANGELOG for background.
This is experimental. Use at your own risk!
To quickly download the latest batch file, you can run this from CMD:
powershell iwr -uri "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davehasagithub/slidewsl/master/dist/getslidewsl.bat" -outfile getslidewsl.bat- First, be sure to familiarize yourself with WSL2
- See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-manual
- Enable Windows feature: Windows Subsystem for Linux
- And the feature: Virtual Machine Platform
- Update Subsystem for Linux: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9P9TQF7MRM4R
- Install Oracle Linux 8.7: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9NGGZVB0BKD9
getslidewsl.bat <username> <password> [<path to sync.sh>]Footnotes
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This works because simple shell scripts and various assets are encoded into base64 chunks that become a series of variables in the lone batch file. These can then be decoded to reconstitute everything needed to provision the WSL2 distro. Interaction may be required to confirm overwriting an existing distro and for Windows UAC popups. ↩