Tips for web developers under WSL 2

As a Ruby Developer I use Windows only if I want to play some games, because it is pretty hard to work with it. However WSL 2 is big step toward and I decided to try it. Previously I tried WSL 1 and it was painful to setup project, a lot of bugs and segfaults. With WSL 2 things are getting much better. In this post I’m not going to describe how to install it, it is pretty straightforward now, but more about useful stuff.

Install Windows Terminal

It is much better than default terminal, you can even use ctrl+c and ctrl+v 😆

Setup your user

By default you will be logged in as root user, it is not very good to have access to everything by default. I suggest creating separate sudo user

sudo adduser simpl1g

You will be asked some questions along with password and at the end, you’ll be prompted to confirm that the information you entered is correct. Also add user to sudoers so that you can run commands as administrator

sudo usermod -aG sudo simpl1g

Set newly created user as default for WSL

Open default command prompt or PowerShell and run

ubuntu config --default-user simpl1g

Set default profile and folder for Windows Terminal

I found this answer very usefull. So in the end I have in settings.json

{ 
  "defaultProfile": "{2c4de342-38b7-51cf-b940-2309a097f518}" # Automatically open Terminal with Ubuntu
  ...
  {
    "colorScheme": "Solarized Dark",                         # Use Solarized color scheme of terminal
    "guid": "{2c4de342-38b7-51cf-b940-2309a097f518}",
    "hidden": false,
    "name": "Ubuntu",
    "source": "Windows.Terminal.Wsl",
    "startingDirectory": "\\\\wsl$\\Ubuntu\\home\\simpl1g"   # Default folder for your new user 
  }
}

Now you can start development like in normal Ubuntu, I was able to install and launch everything that was required for my daily work project. Happy coding)