WSL
Notes on running NixOS on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL, WSL2)
Setup
Ensure that WSL is installed and up to date.
wsl --install
wsl --update
Sometimes you'll have to install WSL2 manually by downloading the msi-installation package.
NixOS is not yet packaged as a official WSL distribution or on the Microsoft store. Download the latest release of nixos-wsl.tar.gz
from the NixOS-WSL Github page.
Import the WSL container using PowerShell
wsl --import NixOS .\NixOS\ nixos-wsl.tar.gz --version 2
Usage
Start it with PowerShell
wsl -d NixOS
Tips and tricks
Run container on startup
To run the distro NixOS
on Windows startup or user login in the background, proceed with following commands in PowerShell
echo "" > $HOME\run_wsl2_at_startup.vbs
notepad $HOME\run_wsl2_at_startup.vbs
Inside the script we define NixOS
as the distribution name, as imported in the setup step above
$HOME\run_wsl2_at_startup.vbs
set object = createobject("wscript.shell")
object.run "wsl.exe --distribution NixOS", 0
Execute following command to open the task planer
taskschd.msc
Click on Create task
on the right pane, set name to WSL
. On the tab "Triggers" click on "New ..." and select run task on user login in the dropdown menu. On the tab "Action" click on "New ..." and insert as command: %USERPROFILE%\run_wsl2_at_startup.vbs