Skip to content

Using Windows with WSL

How to use GalaChain with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

1. Install Docker Desktop

Download and install Docker Desktop from the official website: https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop

If you already have Docker Desktop installed, make sure to update it to the latest version.

2. Install WSL 2 and a Ubuntu-20.04 distribution

Follow the official guide to install WSL 2: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

We reccomend using Ubuntu-20.04 as your distribution. You can install it running the following command on PowerShell:

wsl --install -d Ubuntu-20.04

Here is a short video from Microsoft about how to install WSL 2 and how to prepare it to build Node.js applications:

3. Enable WSL integration on Docker Desktop

Open Docker Desktop and go to Settings > Resources > WSL Integration and enable the integration with your WSL distribution.

remote-command-palette

4. Mount Your Current Windows Directory in WSL (Optional)

If you want to access your Windows file system directly from WSL (e.g., to work with files in your Windows directories like C:\Users\YourUsername\Documents\), you can set up WSL to automatically mount your Windows drives.

  1. Edit the WSL Configuration File:

Open your /etc/wsl.conf file in a text editor. If it doesn’t exist, create it:

sudo nano /etc/wsl.conf
  1. Add the Following Configuration:

Add these lines to the file:

[boot]
systemd=true

[automount]
enabled=true
root=/mnt/
options="metadata,umask=22,fmask=11"
  • metadata: Enables the storage of Linux file system metadata (such as permissions and symbolic links) on the mounted Windows drives.
  • umask=22: Sets the default permission of new directories to 0755 and files to 0644.

  • fmask=11: Sets the default permission of new files to 0666, ensuring they are not executable by default.

  • Restart WSL:

After saving the changes, restart your WSL environment:

wsl --shutdown

Start WSL again, and your Windows drives should be mounted under /mnt/, for example, /mnt/c for the C: drive.

  1. Access Your Windows Directories:

Now you can navigate to your Windows directories from within WSL, like this:

cd /mnt/c/Users/YourUsername/Documents/MyFolder

5. Install dependencies and start network

  1. Use the WSL extension on VSCode to connect to your WSL distribution.
  2. Install Node Version Manager (NVM) on your WSL distribution: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/javascript/nodejs-on-wsl#install-nvm-nodejs-and-npm
  3. Install yq and jq on your WSL distribution: 
    sudo snap install yq jq
  4. At this point your WSL environment should be ready to use GalaChain. Follow the instructions on the Getting Started guide to install the CLI and initialize your project.