We are pleased to announce the availability of our Technical Preview of Docker Desktop for WSL 2!





As a refresher, this preview makes use of the new Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) version that Microsoft recently made available on Windows insider fast ring. It has allowed us to provide improvements to file system sharing, boot time and access to some new features for Docker Desktop users.





To do this we have changed quite a bit about how we interact with the operating system compared to Docker Desktop on Windows today:





To learn more about the full feature set have a look at our previous blog: Get Ready for Tech Preview of Docker Desktop for WSL 2 and Docker WSL 2 – The Future of Docker Desktop for Windows.





Want to give it a go?

Get setup on a Windows machine on the latest Windows Insider build. The first step for this is heading over to the Microsoft and getting set up as a Windows Insider: https://insider.windows.com/en-gb/getting-started/

You’ll need to install the latest release branch (at least build version 18932) and you will then want to enable the WSL 2 feature in Windows: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-install

Then get Ubuntu 18.04 on your machine: Microsoft store.

Finally, download the Tech Preview Docker Desktop for WSL 2 Technical Preview

If you are having issues or want more detailed steps, have a look at our docs here.





Things to try:

Navigate between WSL 2 and traditional Docker

Use $ docker context ls to view the different contexts available.



The daemon running in WSL 2 runs side-by-side with the “classic” Docker Desktop daemon. This is done by using a separate Docker Context. Run `docker context use wsl` to use the WSL 2 based daemon, and `docker context use default` to use the Docker Desktop classic daemon. The “default” context will target either the Moby Linux VM daemon or the Windows Docker daemon depending if you are in Linux or Windows mode.



Access full system resources

Use $ docker info to inspect the system statistics. You should see all of your system resources (CPU & memory) available to you in the WSL 2 context.



Linux workspaces

Source code and build scripts can live inside WSL 2 and access the same Docker Daemon as from Windows. Bind mounting files from WSL 2 is supported, and provides better I/O performance.



Visual Studio remote with WSL

You can work natively with Docker and Linux from Visual Studio Code on Windows.

If you are a Visual Studio Code user make sure you have installed the plugin from the marketplace. You can then connect to WSL 2 and access your source in Linux, which means you can use the console in VSCode to build your containers using any existing Linux build scripts from within the Windows UI.



For full instructions have a look through Microsoft’s documentation: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/wsl

File system improvements:

If you are a PHP Symfony user let us know your thoughts! We found that page refreshes went from ~400ms to ~15ms when we were running from a Linux Workspace.

Want to Learn More?



