After trying Debian in WSL, now I'm trying for something lighter, the Alpine distro.
Requirements
- Having WSL (WSL2) activated
Installing Alpine WSL
Open Microsoft Store and search for Alpine WSL. Install and Open after it installed.
When you launch it at first, it will perform the installation setup and wait for it.
If your installation froze up to the last line like in the image above for like more than few minutes, try to close it and reopen alpine linux. Somehow the installation was actually completed.
Checking the installed Alpine version
Use the cat /etc/os-release command to see the release information.
Common APK commands for Alpine
Alpine is powered with command tools named apk, stands for Alpine Package Keeper. You can confirm it's installed by typing apk and you will see the apk version and usage information.
Updating the repository indexes
To download and update the packages information to the latest, use this command:
apk update
Installing packages with apk
You can browse for the available packages at pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages or you can search it using CLI. Since Alpine Linux doesn't come with built-in editor like nano in ubuntu, we have to install it as the demo.
apk search nano
Above commands will list available packages that has nano on it's name.
But the straightforward to install it, just type this:
apk add nano
Check if the nano version actually matches the version in the latest available packages.
nano --version
Now you can try to edit a file using nano. But maybe you have to create it first using touch sample.txt and then you can nano sample.txt afterward.
Testing Python server in Alpine WSL
You can install python3 using apk command:
apk add python3
Confirm the python installation using python3 --version. Just like what we've tried in Debian WSL, you can start a simpl python server using
python3 -m http.server 8000
And open http://localhost:8000 in your browser to confirm it.
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