Scott Hanselman

My colleague Tara and I were working on prepping a system for Azure IoT development and were using WSL2 on our respective machines. The scripts we were running were long-running and tedious and by the time they were done we basically had a totally customized perfect distro.

Rather than sharing our scripts and having folks run them for hours, we instead decided to export the distro and import it on n number of machines. That way Tara could set up the distro perfectly and then give it to me.

For example, when using PowerShell I can do this:

C:\Users\Scott\Desktop> wsl --export PerfectWSLDistro ./PerfectWSLDistro.tar

Then I can share the resulting tar and give it to a friend and they can do this! (Note that I'm using ~ which is your home directory from PowerShell. If you're using cmd.exe you'll want to include the full path like c:\users\scott\Appdata\Local\PerfectDistro)

mkdir ~/AppData/Local/PerfectDistro
wsl --import PerfectDistro ~/AppData/Local/PerfectDistro ./PerfectWSLDistro.tar --version 2

You can list our your WSL distros like this:

C:\Users\Scott\Desktop> wsl --list -v
  NAME            STATE           VERSION
* Ubuntu-18.04    Stopped         2
  WLinux          Stopped         2
  Debian          Stopped         1
  PerfectDistro   Stopped         2

It's surprisingly easy! Also, make sure you have the latest version of the Windows Terminal (and if you've got an old version and haven't deleted your profile.json, it's time to start fresh) it will automatically detect your WSL distros and make menu items for them!

Also be sure to check out my YouTube video on developing with WSL2!

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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