WSL Link

Allows WSL users to run any CMD commands on host Windows system from within linux subsystem.

WHY

StackOverflow Question

When doing web development on Windows using Windows Subsystem for Linux you sometimes have to install and run Windows versions of npm packages. This will require you to switch shells and/or terminal application to use node and npm installed on the Windows host.

This package will allow you to link wsl to your host system through wsl-link command. You will be able to run your Windows npm applications directly from you WSL shell.

WSL 2

This package will not work for WSL2 but it is fortunately not needed. In WSL 2 you can just use .exe commands in linux to achive the same result:

powershell.exe node -v
powershell.exe start .

Requirements

• Windows 10
• WSL
• Node.js
• NPM

Node and NPM have to be installed both in linux subsystem and on Windows host system.

Install

wsl-link has to be installed separately in subsystem and on Windows host

On subsystem linux:

npm i wsl-link -g

On Windows host:

npm i wsl-link -g

Windows Startup

To run script at startup on windows I use PM2 with supplied daemon script.

Install pm2 and pm2-windows-startup on Windows host:

npm i pm2 pm2-windows-startup -g

Install pm2-startup:

pm2-startup install

Run wsl-link pm2 daemon:

wsl-link-pm2

Save pm2 list of processes

pm2 save

You can now confirm that the wsl-link app is running, with:

pm2 status

Usage

On Windows start server (if not using startup setup with pm2):

wsl-link

Use on subsystem linux (npm -v will be run on host Windows):

wsl-link npm -v

Case

On subsystem linux setup a project (or use existing):

mkdir wsl-link-test
cd wsl-link-test
touch app.js
npm init

app.js:

const Nightmare = require('nightmare');

(async () => {
  await Nightmare({
    show: true
  })
  .goto('https://google.com');
})();

Install Windows version of Nightmare.js and run it on Windows.

wsl-link npm i nightmare --save
wsl-link node app

You should see Electron browser open on your Windows host.

Config

Optionally both Windows and WSL commands will use env vars for host/port configuration.

• Set WSL_PORT env to change default port.
• Set WSL_HOST env to change default host, ie '127.0.0.1'.

Port and host must be configured to be the same both on WSL and on Windows host.

Windows specific config.

For running commands not in /mnt/* Windows wsl-link server will need to know your linux root path on Windows. By default it is set to

C:\\Users\\%USERNAME%\\AppData\\Local\\Packages\\CanonicalGroupLimited.Ubuntu18.04onWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\\LocalState\\rootfs

that is what it is on my machine. If it is different for you, you can set a custom WIN_BASE_DIR env var and point it to your linux root.

• Set WIN_BASE_DIR evn to change base win dir to operate outside /mnt/* folders on linux.