DEV Community: Henrique Holtz

2 options to install Cursor CLI for Windows (WSL2)

Henrique Holtz — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 21:31:49 +0000

Hi everyone! In this article I wanna show you 2 options to install and run the cursor CLI on a Windows O.S (both require WSL2 + linux distro like ubuntu) for .NET developers (but you can use it for other stacks as well, just adapt it):

Everything including git and repositories within the linux distro (better performance but greater overhead to setup)
Just the Cursor CLI within the linux distro (easier, performance overhead just for the Cursor CLI)

Here you'll also learn how to setup the terminal within the Visual Studio 2022+ to use the Cursor CLI (or others tools).

We won't focus on details like how to setup WSL2 + linux distro, neither install the git, you can google it. I know you can.

Note: I'll consider you have the WSL2 already set up!

Initial Setup

Once you have the linux distro running through your WSL2 (I'd suggest you to install the distro via Microsoft Store), you can open a terminal within the linux distro by using:

# Find the distro name
wsl --list

# Run into linux via WSL2
C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe -d {distro_name}

The following steps are within the linux terminal:

Install cursor-cli and run cursor-agent (it can require to restart the linux or reopen the terminal). It will prompt you to log in using your browser, so, super easy.
Setup the linux terminal within your Visual Studio (you can use it from Windows Terminal as well):
- Name: Whatever you want to
- Shell location: C:\WINDOWS\system32\wsl.exe
- Arguments: -d {your_distro_name} (you can find out it by running wsl --list)

Here you're ready to use the Cursor CLI, the following steps are if you wanna run everything from WSL2 (better performance for Cursor CLI)

Install and setup the git (+ gitlab/github if needed) into the linux
Install .NET SDK steps for .NET 10
Clone the desired repository and open its solution file with you Visual Studio via WSL2 (click to "open a solution" and find the solution file within the path \\wsl$)
Open the integrated terminal we setup before and run cursor-agent

Done! You can now choose between these 2 options to run the Cursor CLI on your Windows machine + WSL2!

Any questions/suggestions? Let a comment below. Bye!

How to debug any website access through your Mobile device (using Chrome)

Henrique Holtz — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 18:25:11 +0000

Hi there! Here you'll quickly learn how to debug any website navigation from you mobile device (Android only).

With USB debugging + Chrome's Dev Tools you can see any logs, network requests, etc.

Requirements

Android device
USB data cable
A trustable desktop/laptop with Google Chrome

Setup

1. Enable the Developer mode

On your android you need to enable the developer mode. Usually this can be achieved by navigating to Settings => About Phone (or similar) and tapping the build number a couple of times (until it tells you the developer mode is enabled)

2. Enable USB Debugging

Once you have the developer mode enabled, you need to enable the USB Debugging: Settings => Developer Options => USB Debugging (or similar)

3. Connect your mobile device to your desktop/laptop

This step is just to connect your mobile device to your desktop/laptop via USB data cable. Your android system can require you to accept the USB debugging.

4. Debug the desired webpage on your desktop/laptop

Open the desired webpage on your mobile device (via chrome);
On your desktop/laptop open the following url through your chrome browser: chrome://inspect/#devices;
Within the devices tab you'll see the opened tabs from your mobile device. Select the desired and click on inspect

Then a new tab will be opened, and there you can use the Chrome Dev Tools functionalities like see the logs, network requests, and even navigate the website from your desktop/laptop

Official doc and more information: https://developer.android.com/studio/debug/dev-options

How to embed your git bash into Visual Studio

Henrique Holtz — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 01:14:37 +0000

Today you'll learn how to integrate your git bash straight into your Visual Studio. In the end it'll looks just like this:

To do that you need open the terminal configuration section in the following tab: Tools => Options => Environment => Terminal.

Then you should click in the Add button and configure its name and the path location pointing to the basn.exe. The most important part here is to add -i -l in the arguments field. These arguments are to set up the git bash to be open embedded.

Usually the bash's location is similar as C:\Program Files\Git\git-bash.exe

Optionally you can set this terminal as default.

The configuration should looks similar as the following image:

Now, to open the terminal go to View => Terminal. If you didn't set up the git bash as default you'll need to open it explicitly like this:

Hopefully it'll be pretty useful to have the power of git bash directly into your VS! Thanks for reading.

The easiest and best way to create the gitignore file for .Net repositories

Henrique Holtz — Wed, 01 May 2024 18:39:51 +0000

Have you ever had to google "gitignore file for .Net apps", copy and manually create it into your repository?

That was a common situation to me before I found out a easiest (and better) way to do that.

Basically instead the manual path, you can simply use the .NET CLI to do that automatically for you, just type the command below:

dotnet new gitignore

Done! The .NET CLI created the .gitignore for you.

It was pretty simple, right?

How I use ChatGPT to create flash cards for Anki to learn English

Henrique Holtz — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 12:00:21 +0000

Hello there! In this straightforward and short article I'll tell you how I'm creating English flash cards for Anki using ChatGPT (free version).

For me, an Anki flash card needs to be:

A short sentence where only one word is unknown/weird for me (yet) (100% in the target language), which this new word is highlighted.
With an audio (I can cover how to do that in a next article if you want to)
In the back side, I put the meaning of the word in the target language always as possible

Usually I try to create a few cards (at least 2 for each new word) in different tenses like simple past, present, present perfect, interrogate, negative and so on.

Also, I check how common is that word, because I'm not interested in learn words which are rarely used.

To do that I ask for ChatGPT using the following prompt:

Please give me the meaning as a summary (1 line), how much this is word is common (1-1000 score), and 1 short sentence to each of the following forms: interrogative, negative, present, present perfect, past and future for the word "x"

For example, I sent for ChatGPT this prompt using the word unevenly, see the output:

If the word's score is below 400, usually I skip the word and gonna find another one more common.

With that, I select some few sentences which represents for me a sentence I know the whole phrase except the unevenly word and I create the flash card itself.

Thanks for reading.

How to do "ping" with a specific target-port

Henrique Holtz — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 14:54:12 +0000

In this article we'll shortly see how to do ping against a host or IP but pointing a specific port.

It can be very useful to see if your container/application is alive, for example.

Using Powershell (windows)

We can use the Test-NetConnection function passing the port as a parameter, for example:

 Test-NetConnection <host-or-ip> -port <target-port>

Using cURL

With cURL is untill simplier, just type curl <host-or-ip>:<target-port>. Example:

curl 127.0.0.1:1433

How to create your own functions on Bash

Henrique Holtz — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 14:25:53 +0000

In this article we'll shortly learn how to create your own commands/functions on Bash.

You can use it whatever the OS since you're using a bash-derived terminal like Bash, Zsh, Git Bash and so on.

First of all we'll create the functions. You can choose the file name and its location. In my example I'll create as /home/henrique/my-own-functions.sh (You can use the command touch /home/henrique/ my-own-functions.sh to create the file)

Let's write our first function in the new file:

function MyFirstFunction() {
        echo "Hello World!"
}

Note: To type the function directly in your bash you can use the vim, example: vim /home/henrique/ my-own-functions.sh

After write our function(s) we need to load it in our bash by default, e to do that we need to write a line to load it in the .bashrc file which usually stay in your user's root folder, in my case is at /home/henrique/.bashrc. To load we'll write and save a new line in this file with:

{...}
source /home/henrique/my-own-functions.sh
{...}

After save the change, we need to reopen the bash to verify if our new function is available correctly. To use our new function we'll just type MyFirstFunction and press enter. See the output:

Extra

You can test your function without need to reopen the terminal using the source command. For example:

source /home/henrique/my-own-functions.sh

[extra-basic] How to create a SQL Server instance with docker container (linux based)

Henrique Holtz — Sat, 18 Feb 2023 09:33:26 +0000

Hello dears, in this simple article we'll see how to create a SQL Server instance into a docker container (linux based). We'll use the mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2022-latest image. Let's go!

Create the Dockerfile

FROM mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2022-latest

ENV ACCEPT_EULA=Y
ENV MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD=MyStrong@Passw0rd
ENV MSSQL_PID=Developer
ENV MSSQL_TCP_PORT=1433

WORKDIR /src

RUN (/opt/mssql/bin/sqlservr --accept-eula & ) | grep -q "Service Broker manager has started" &&  /opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd -S127.0.0.1 -Usa -P MyStrong@Passw0rd

Build our docker image

docker build -t henriqueholtz/sql-linux-2022 .

Run a container with our own docker image

docker run -d -p 1433:1433 --name sqlgen henriqueholtz/sql-linux-2022

Access our container and see make a simple SELECT.

docker exec -it sqlgen bash
/opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd -S localhost -U SA -P "MyStrong@Passw0rd"
> SELECT name FROM master.dbo.sysdatabases
> GO

If you are using a Windows with WSL2 (because the docker must be running linux containers), you can also access using the SQL Server Management Studio using the server name 127.0.0.1 for example.

Now, with the SQL instance running, you can create your own databases and/or restore from a backup (.bak) file.

Crédits: [Basic] Docker image 🐳 Dockerfile — SQL Server with custom prefill DB scripts

How to reset root password on gitlab-ce (self-managed) using gitlab-rake

Henrique Holtz — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 10:51:43 +0000

In this article we'll see how to reset root password on gitlab-ce (community edition) self-managed using the embedded tool gitlab-rake.

First we need access the container of gitlab-ce (you can see How to run gitlab-ce (self-managed) on docker container), we'll access it by container name, in my case is gitlab_ce, let's entry with this command:



docker exec -it gitlab_ce bin/bash

Then, into the container we'll reset the root password directly using the command bellow:



gitlab-rake "gitlab:password:reset[root]"

The above command will request for you the new password and your confirm password. After you should see some message successfully as the image below:

It's ready! Now, you can make your login with your new password and the root login:

Thanks for reading!

How to run ReactJs on Windows container

Henrique Holtz — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 09:05:00 +0000

Hi dev, in this article we'll see how to run ReactJs application on windows container.

We'll use docker images who can run NodeJs on Windows container (not are official of NodeJs) explained in this article.

First, we'll generate our own create-react-app to use it on c:\Projects as my-own-cra:

npx create-react-app my-own-cra

Now we can run the container directly, or using docker-compose, let's see both:

1. Run container directly

Now we'll run one container with our create-react-app inside, to do this we use the command below (use powershell):

docker run -t -p 3000:3000 --name=my-own-cra-windows-container -v C:\Projects\my-own-cra\:C:\app\ henriqueholtz/node-win:16.17.0 cmd /c "npm -v & node -v & npm start"

The result on the terminal will be something as:

Now we can access on your browser with http://localhost:3000 and see our create-react-app running on windows container:

2. Run container with `docker-compose`

First we'll create our dpcker-compose.yml (in c:\Projects\my-own-cra, as:

version: '3.8'

services:
  my-own-cra:
    container_name: my-own-cra
    image: henriqueholtz/node-win:16.17.0
    command: cmd /c "npm -v & node -v & npm start"
    ports:
      - '3000:3000'
    volumes:
      - "C:\\Projects\\my-own-cra\\:C:\\app\\"

After that, open the terminal (in the same folder) and run docker-compose:

docker-compose up

Here we can access http://localhost:3000 also, and see our create-react-app running, same as before.

Thanks for reading!

How to execute Windows container with NodeJs

Henrique Holtz — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 10:56:00 +0000

Hi dear, in this article we'll see how to execute Windows container with NodeJs

Note: For now, don't exists any official docker image with NodeJs to Windows container. You can confire at the official repository on dockerhub: https://hub.docker.com/_/node/

Let's see one example to run Windows container with NodeJs, separated at:

Some Versions >= 14.19.0 from the image henriqueholtz/node-win see official repository on dockerhub
Some versions <= 13 from the image stefanscherer/node-windows see official repository on dockerhub

Note: You can see the tags that are the versions of NodeJs, for example henriqueholtz/node-win:16.15.1 have the NodeJs on 16.15.1 version.

Let's run it!

In your terminal, run the command below to create the container with the name win-16-15-1



docker run -d -t --name=node-win-16-15-1 henriqueholtz/node-win:16.15.1

After created, we can access the container by name with the command:



docker exec -it node-win-16-15-1 cmd

Now we are into the container, and we can see the NodeJs version with the simple command:



node --version

With this we can run another apps like ReactJs, NextJs and much more, on Windows container!

See How to run ReactJs on Windows container

Thanks for reading. See you in another post!

How to run gitlab-ce (self-managed) on docker container [part 1]

Henrique Holtz — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 09:37:00 +0000

Here we'll see how to run the gitlab-ce (community edition) self-managed on docker container (linux based). We'll use docker-compose too.

First we'll create a new variable GITLAB_HOME, in my case I used this command:

export GITLAB_HOME=$HOME/gitlab

You can verify if the variable it's correctly run echo $GITLAB_HOME in your terminal.

After that, we'll create our files as docker-compose.yml. Choose one folder to it and let's start!

Now, create one file named root_password.txt, and put on it one string to use as the root password. In my case I fill with RootP@ssord123!.

Then, we can create our docker-compose.yml, you can use my template bellow:

version: '3.6'
services:
  web:
    image: 'gitlab/gitlab-ce:latest'
    container_name: gitlab_ce
    restart: always
    hostname: 'gitlab.henriqueholtz.com'
    environment:
      GITLAB_OMNIBUS_CONFIG: |
        external_url 'https://gitlab.henriqueholtz.com'
    ports:
      - '80:80'
      - '443:443'
      - '22:22'
    volumes:
      - '$GITLAB_HOME/config:/etc/gitlab'
      - '$GITLAB_HOME/logs:/var/log/gitlab'
      - '$GITLAB_HOME/data:/var/opt/gitlab'
    shm_size: '256m'
    secrets:
      - gitlab_root_password

  gitlab_docs:
    image: registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-docs:latest
    container_name: gitlab_ce_docs
    hostname: 'https://docs.gitlab.henriqueholtz.com:4000'
    ports:
      - '4000:4000'

secrets:
  gitlab_root_password:
    file: ./root_password.txt

Then we are ready to run our container, then run docker-compose up -d.

Note: If you want use the hostname above (ex: gitlab.henriqueholtz.com), you need to add it on the hosts config. Or we can use the localhost or 127.0.0.1.

Using https://localhost (default port, 443), we already can see the gitlab web interface, but with the 502 status code:

The container can spend some minutes to stand up (for me something around 10 minutes). Meanwhile we can see the logs of our container with the command bellow:

docker logs gitlab-ce -f

We can access our gitlab-docs at localhost:4000:

Some minutes later, we can access our gitlab community edition self-managed, and see the login page: (ex: http://localhost)

Now, to access your own gitlab you can reset the root password of gitlab-ce

The official documentation to install gitlab-ce self-managed of gitlab: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/docker.html

Thanks for reading, I see you later, in the next part!