WSL - distro-data-sharing-scripts¶

Collection of WSL scripts to deal with WSL distro acting as a data server, and others acting as data clients.

The main goal is to be able to work and interate on Linux related projects, in Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04, Alpine, and even Windows host, while all of them have access to the same data stored in Linux and closer to the docker engines.

Each of those shares are mounted with mount --bind, which means they will truly act like native local linux folders in each client distro

High level¶

• SERVER: A dedicated WSL distro for data, with systemd enabled.
• CLIENTS:
• a wsl distro with a systemd service that mounts data automatically
• a wsl distro without systemd and instead on user login does that mount

Import a distro with your own name¶

One thing that is leveraged here is the ability to import a WSL distribution under a name of your choosing.

Manually this implies something like creating an official Ubuntu distro, setting it up if needed, exporting it, removing it, and re-import it one or multiple times, under a specific name.

To make that process much faster, we are leveraging an open source project that pre-builds importable WSL images. Not precisely tailored to the needs here but can be tweaked and eventually a variant might get added to do just that.

Status¶

Work in progress

Flow¶

Let's take an example use case where a gs- prefix is used on a set of WSL distributions.

Create a WSL distro dedicated for your data¶

Import and configure WSL distro with systemd enabled as gs-data. (with instructions in that link)

The distro link above is the easiest option, but you can absolutely set one on your own for this work.

Setup server WSL distribution¶

• Login / start shell into gs-data
• Create new data folder in your linux home folder
• Inside it, clone this project.
• cd server/ folder
• Run make and follow instructions there.
• example: SHARE_TARGET=gs-data make and keep defining the vars it tells you to define

Once done, you will see a green status for that server service.

A new git ignored file will also have been generated and should stay there to help clients also get configured.

Setup client WSL distributions¶

For a systemd enabled distro¶

A systemd service gets created and will handle mount / unmount.

• Import and configure a gs-ubuntu-2204 distro
• Login / start shell into gs-ubuntu-2204
• make -C /mnt/wsl/gs-data/wsl-data-sharing/client install-systemd

For other distros¶

An addition to user .profile gets added and handles mount on first login.

• Import and configure X distro
• Login / start shell
• make -C /mnt/wsl/gs-data/wsl-data-sharing/client install-profile