Can ddev work with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)?

2021 Update: DDEV has WSL2 install instructions.

(2018-11-15: Updated for ddev v1.4.0) It's pretty tweaky, but it can be done. Note that there are no tests or performance results on this, and it's not a supported technique.

Note that WSL actually behaves like linux and uses linux binaries, so you'll use the linux version of ddev.

The biggest problem is that the docker daemon is running under native Windows and WSL has a different filesystem layout, so you have to kind of trick everything on the WSL side to use paths that the Docker daemon will be able to find in native windows.

• Start by setting up your WSL/Docker environment as described in this excellent article: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/setting-up-docker-for-windows-and-wsl-to-work-flawlessly#ensure-volume-mounts-work - BUT use DOCKER_HOST=tcp://127.0.0.1:2375 instead of using "localhost" in there.

• Install ddev using the Linux instructions.

• Make sure all projects are already rm'd with ddev rm -a; projects already running or stopped in native Windows can't be accessed by ddev from WSL-land.

• You're probably going to use the web browser on your windows side of the machine, so add the hostname of your project on the Windows side with ddev hostname <yourproject.ddev.local> 127.0.0.1

• cd /c/Users//path/to/project (This is a path docker understands.)

• ddev start

• Visit the project with your browser.

Basically, with this technique you're using paths that the Docker daemon knows how to follow in native windows.

Anyway, it seems to work with a trivial example. Your comments are welcome and we may be able to improve support in the future if people like it.

I have it working (current 1.5.1) inside of WSL. I'm using Docker Toolbox so Docker4Windows may be different.

General setup inside of WSL (I'm using ubuntu)

1. install docker (apt-get install docker.io)
2. copy default docker machine certificates to WSL via

cp /mnt/c/Users/[YOUR WINDOWS USER]/.docker/machine/machines/default/*.pem ~/.docker

3. setup your environment variable inside of WSL (eg. in ~/.bashrc)

export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://192.168.99.100:2376

export DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY=1

export DOCKER_CERT_PATH=~/.docker

The actual values to use can be determined via docker-machine.exe env from the docker toolbox!

At this point you should get a complete output from docker version (don't forget to restart your shell to actually load the modified environment)

Client:
 Version:           18.06.1-ce
 API version:       1.38
 Go version:        go1.10.4
 Git commit:        e68fc7a
 Built:             Fri Oct 19 19:43:14 2018
 OS/Arch:           linux/amd64
 Experimental:      false

Server:
 Engine:
  Version:          18.06.1-ce
  API version:      1.38 (minimum version 1.12)
  Go version:       go1.10.3
  Git commit:       e68fc7a
  Built:            Tue Aug 21 17:28:38 2018
  OS/Arch:          linux/amd64
  Experimental:     false

Containers can't be started yet as the mount of file systems will fail!

With Docker Toolbox the docker server has the host file system available under /c/. But running from WSL the expected path is /mnt/c/

4. Generating a symlink is sufficient to make it available docker-machine.exe ssh default 'sudo ln -s /c /mnt/c'

This command has to be rerun after reboot or you have to make the changes permanent via the bootlocal.sh mechanism.

Test your mapping with docker run --rm -i -t -v ${PWD}:/mnt ubuntu bash from WSL.

5. Install docker-compose, depending on your distribution it is outdated and needs to be replaced with a current version.

6. Enjoy ddev