The TL DR is you can’t run anything in the foreground with interactive mode, which makes it unusable for real web development.īut with the Docker CLI configured to the remote Docker for Windows host it’s really awesome! Using this method, very large Rails applications respond in ~100ms (or ~5s when having to compile 10,000+ lines of Javascript and SCSS). If you’re wondering “why not just run docker.exe and docker-compose.exe from Docker for Windows directly in WSL?”, that’s due to a bug with running Docker or Docker Compose interactively in that environment. While the Docker daemon cannot run directly on WSL, you can use the Docker CLI to connect to a remote Docker daemon running through Docker for Windows or any other VM you create (this article covers both methods). You can even run graphical apps and it doesn’t require a VM. If you don’t, I have another article that goes over how to set up an amazing WSL based development environment within Windows. This article expects you to have WSL set up already. Just know that I’ve moved on to using WSL 2 and that none of the steps below are necessary to do with WSL 2.

I’ve decided to keep this post unmodified and fully working for WSL 1 in case you want to continue using it. I’ve recorded a video of how I have Docker Desktop along with WSL 2 working together along with other tools that I use. They even backported in support for WSL 2 in Windows versions 19. Update in 2020: Now that Microsoft has released the Spring 2020 Windows update we have access to WSL 2 on all editions of Windows 10 (including Home).

Windows terminal wsl home directory