Prepping environment - Linux Command Wrapping Part 2
Before we get into the nitty gritty of figuring stuff out, we need to set things up. This article describes our baseline.
This is not going to be detailled walk-through on any and every step I do or did. The assumption is that you are an experienced PowerShell coder and have created PowerShell modules before. That being said, I always found it annoying when somebody posted some code with no reference in which circumanstances they developed and tested it, resulting in you having to spend your precious time in figuring that out instead of actually contributing. So here is a run-over of our development environment baseline.
The assumption here is that all is being done on an Windows 11 machine with both Windows Terminal and Visual Studio Code already is present on the system.
Before anything can be done, we need a Linux box with PowerShell on it.
note to self: replace all of this with winget install script
WSL
The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is perfect for this. Previos link explains on how to instal WSL. By default, Ubuntu will be installed.
When you have installed Docker for instance, you may find that WSL already is present on your system. Then you just need to add Ubuntu via de command-line like this:
wsl --install ubuntu
You will be asked to provide credetials to logon into Ubuntu.
You can set the Ubuntu system as the default one like this:
wsl --list
Windows Subsystem for Linux Distributions:
docker-desktop (Default)
Ubuntu
wsl --set-default ubuntu
wsl --list
Windows Subsystem for Linux Distributions:
Ubuntu (Default)
docker-desktop
If Ubuntu already is on your system, you can update in 2 ways. Either via Linux commands, shown in next section, or via the WSL command like this:
wsl --update ubuntu
Once everything is installed, you can either call/activate a session via just calling wsl on the command line, or by selecting it in the drop down menu in Windows Terminal.
The version I am working on:
Welcome to Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 6.6.87.2-microsoft-standard-WSL2 x86_64)
PowerShell
Installing PowerShell can be done in a number of ways. To best working manual option for me was using the script provided here. It also updates the system. Below is just a copy of that script for your convienience.
###################################
# Prerequisites
# Update the list of packages
sudo apt-get update
# Install pre-requisite packages.
sudo apt-get install -y wget apt-transport-https software-properties-common
# Get the version of Ubuntu
source /etc/os-release
# Download the Microsoft repository keys
wget -q https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/$VERSION_ID/packages-microsoft-prod.deb
# Register the Microsoft repository keys
sudo dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb
# Delete the Microsoft repository keys file
rm packages-microsoft-prod.deb
# Update the list of packages after we added packages.microsoft.com
sudo apt-get update
###################################
# Install PowerShell
sudo apt-get install -y powershell
# Start PowerShell
pwsh
Some metadata and references
Some metadata for context and reference
Windows PowerShell
$psversiontable
Name Value
---- -----
PSVersion 5.1.26100.4061
PSEdition Desktop
PSCompatibleVersions {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0...}
BuildVersion 10.0.26100.4061
CLRVersion 4.0.30319.42000
WSManStackVersion 3.0
PSRemotingProtocolVersion 2.3
SerializationVersion 1.1.0.1
PowerShell Core (Windows)
$PSversionTable
Name Value
---- -----
PSVersion 7.5.1
PSEdition Core
GitCommitId 7.5.1
OS Microsoft Windows 10.0.26100
Platform Win32NT
PSCompatibleVersions {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…}
PSRemotingProtocolVersion 2.3
SerializationVersion 1.1.0.1
WSManStackVersion 3.0
PowerShell Core (Ubuntu)
$PSVersionTable
Name Value
---- -----
PSVersion 7.5.1
PSEdition Core
GitCommitId 7.5.1
OS Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS
Platform Unix
PSCompatibleVersions {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…}
PSRemotingProtocolVersion 2.3
SerializationVersion 1.1.0.1
WSManStackVersion 3.0
Using the system
In follow up articles i’ll be using the above setup. I will be switching back and forth from the Linux and Windows environments quite a lot.
Because they are on the same machine, you should be able to have access to both file-systems; WSL2 exposes the filesystems in Windows Explorer by default.
It is also quite easy to execute WSL commands from the Windows environment. This can be either Linux or PowerShell commands (once being set-up as described above)
wsl lsblk
NAME
MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 388.4M 1 disk
sdb 8:16 0 186M 1 disk
sdc 8:32 0 4G 0 disk [SWAP]
sdd 8:48 0 1T 0 disk /mnt/wslg/distro
wsl pwsh {get-module -listavailable}
Directory: /opt/microsoft/powershell/7/Modules
ModuleType Version PreRelease Name PSEdition ExportedCommands
---------- ------- ---------- ---- --------- ----------------
Manifest 1.2.5 Microsoft.PowerShell.Archive Desk {Compress-Archive, Expand-Archive}
Manifest 7.0.0.0 Microsoft.PowerShell.Host Core {Start-Transcript, Stop-Transcript}
Manifest 7.0.0.0 Microsoft.PowerShell.Management Core {Add-Content, Clear-Content, Clear-Item…
Binary 1.1.1 Microsoft.PowerShell.PSResourceGet Core,Desk {Compress-PSResource, Find-PSResource, …
Manifest 7.0.0.0 Microsoft.PowerShell.Security Core {Get-Credential, Get-ExecutionPolicy, S…
Manifest 7.0.0.0 Microsoft.PowerShell.Utility Core {Export-Alias, Get-Alias, Import-Alias,…
Script 1.4.8.1 PackageManagement Desk {Find-Package, Get-Package, Get-Package…
Script 2.2.5 PowerShellGet Desk {Find-Command, Find-DSCResource, Find-M…
Script 2.3.6 PSReadLine Desk {Get-PSReadLineKeyHandler, Set-PSReadLi…
Binary 2.0.3 ThreadJob Desk Start-ThreadJob