Access your WSL2 app from another device in your network

scrodrig — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 11:47:38 +0000

We often find ourselves in a situation where we need to test our applications outside our comfy localhost and we try to access from that device and we have an ERROR.

For users like me who used WSL2, I hope this might be helpful.

In Powershell

To check in WSL is running

$ wsl -l -v

Should get an output like this:

  NAME      STATE           VERSION
* Ubuntu    Running         2

In order to get our IP address in our Windows

$ ipconfig | findstr /i "ipv4"

Should get an output like this:

IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.67
IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 172.17.16.1

In order to get our IP address from our Linux machine Windows

$ wsl hostname -I

Should get an output like this:

172.17.30.142

Run one of these example commands commands to map our ports and make them accessible through our network:

One app

$  netsh interface portproxy add v4tov4 listenport=4010 listenaddress=0.0.0.0 connectport=4010 connectaddress=172.17.30.142

Another app

$  netsh interface portproxy add v4tov4 listenport=4020 listenaddress=0.0.0.0 connectport=4020 connectaddress=172.17.30.142

To confirm, please run:

$  netsh interface portproxy show all

Should get an output like this:

Listen on ipv4:             Connect to ipv4:

Address         Port        Address         Port
--------------- ----------  --------------- ----------
0.0.0.0         4020        172.17.30.142   4020
0.0.0.0         4010        172.17.30.142   4010

After this configuration, you can access to the app in any device, using:

http://192.168.1.67:4010/
http://192.168.1.67:4020/

The official documentation is here:

DEV Community: scrodrig

Access your WSL2 app from another device in your network