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Setting up Windows Subsytem for Linux

Micah Shute on September 19, 2018

I am relatively new in the world of programming, and I have decided to document new concepts and other things that took me a while to figure out - ...
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Dave Cranwell • Edited

How is WSL with inotify events these days? I last tried it (like you, piecing it together from a half-dozen inaccurate blogs) about a year ago and was unimpressed.

It's great in principal to be able to run Node and a modern front end stack on the virtual machine, and edit files from windows in VSC. But if saving a file in VSC doesn't notify the Node tasks on WSL that anything has happened, that's basically 90% of the fluidity of any node-based workflow down the toilet.

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Micah Shute

So I only set this up myself a week or so ago, and my experience making apps is minimal - I am still very much learning more than doing. However, I was able to find this blog post by Microsoft confirming inotify support at the end of 2016, and the only github issues open that I could find were around the same timeframe and are now closed. From this evidence, I would guess it works well, but I'll be sure to keep this post up to date with any big issues I encounter.

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Mike Veerman

Hi Micah!

For being "relatively new to the world of programming", you've compiled a nice overview on how to get started!

I've struggled a quite bit getting Docker to run and I have gotten into some ownership issues, but other than that, WSL looks like a promising path for development on Windows...

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Nina Rallies

Well. A few days ago I ran into a problem when trying to get things running. I was getting an error when running VScode and also some other applications...
I Found the guy developing vsCode from Github, found his Twitter, tweeted at him and asked him to answer my question on Stackoverflow ( I'm a weird stalker! I know 😅)
Have a look at his answer, it might be helpful to you as well

stackoverflow.com/questions/523577...

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Micah Shute

Thanks! I downloaded the Windows VSCode, so I didn't run into that problem. It works great, and code . works too if you are in your Windows file system!

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Agamy

Hi Michan!
Thank you for making it that easy I've been all over the internet to get all these info. everything is working fine on my laptop now.
I'm new to programming "Flatiron School" too, starting soon.
the school is asking for a Mac for the Bootcamp but I don't like/can't afford a Mac now. I have a high end Surface Book i7 16 512 dGPU which is amazing!

how is your experience going through the bootcamp using windows?
not sure if I should sell my surface and buy a Macbook pro?

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Micah Shute

Hey man, I have a Mac and a Windows, both are working fine for me. I'm in the Rails section and haven't had any problems with my Windows using WSL. While testing this procedure I also started a React project and there were no obvious problems. There is a Flatiron beta cohort right now with a few students testing my setup to make sure it works through the whole curriculum, and if they don't hit any snags Flatiron is supposedly going to make using WSL an official supported environment. So, long story short I would say that while not "officially supported" by Flatiron, if you like your laptop and have WSL running on it with no problems, you should be fine and I don't see any reason you should sell it for a Mac.

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Agamy

Thank you so much!
I was just googling any good deals on Macs, now I can have some peace!
i did factory reset yesterday to have a clean windows and WSL, went through the steps here and everything looks great.

I'm starting tomorrow (will go with my surface) and I'll check with the instructors. will update in a reply here.

Thanks again
this was really helpful!

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Micah Shute

That's interesting to hear! Like I said in my post, I'm pretty new in the programming world, so I'm definitely not an expert on the subject. The reason I set up WSL as opposed to downloading native Windows versions is because of the article in this Microsoft doc, which said that there are sometimes Windows-specific issues with gems and dependencies when using ruby or nodejs.

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kb3dow • Edited

I landed on your page trying to use VScode with WSL and git using ssh. I use git with the ssh-agent on WSL with no issues but am not able to use that along with VScode. Hoped to find something about that - but shall keep googling! Great article BTW.