from Hacker News

Show HN: Build Your WSL Distro in Docker

by K0IN on 9/12/24, 11:05 AM with 11 comments

• by K0IN on 9/12/24, 11:05 AM

  I love WSL, but I have multiple systems and juggling apt packages is a pain.

  So I had this in my head for a long time, that I can just build a rootfs using docker and load it in WSL.

  I tried it yesterday, and now I have a CLI tool to build my WSL image using Dockerfiles.

  I'm not sure if it helps anyone, but I wanted to share it, just in case.

  Cheers.

• by marmaduke on 9/12/24, 4:22 PM

  This is awesome! I was just today building a new wsl distro, and I didn’t want it tied to just a version of Linux but rather a project. I had to download a rootfs of Ubuntu and import it, and then spent time installing everything. Ofc I could use a bash script to automate the second part.

  So this would have solved my prob: have a dockerfile or image and up an wsl env for it. Given how great wsl is these days (i used to have Linux and Mac as daily drivers, now wsl) I guess this sort of thing will become more and more relevant

• by Rucadi on 9/12/24, 2:17 PM

  Nice tool :) I did something similar in a hackathon some years ago. https://github.com/Rucadi/wsld

  It's totally unmaintained and forgotten :D

  In general, what I do now to generate WSL images is to docker run a container, and then export it to a .tar, finally, install that tar, is that easy.

  However, if I had your tool installed, for sure I would use that for ease of use.

• by el_oni on 9/12/24, 3:58 PM

  Very cool, this should help me to be able to separate my different testing environments.

  Thanks for sharing!

• by cckk on 9/14/24, 9:12 PM

  looks cool! Forgive my ignorance, but what's the adv of this over using Docker on WSL2?

• by pasi1337 on 9/12/24, 5:37 PM

  Thats a pretty nice thing to have!

  Thanks for sharing this.