tooling/wsl-setup.org

Windows Subsystem for Linux Setup

• Update and install packages
• Install spacemacs
• Setup a local emacs pacakge mirror
• Setup mutt email client
• Setup environment dotfiles

Update and install packages

To get started we ensure the package manager is up to date.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Next we install a series of standard packages that form part of our workflow or are dependencies for other tools in our environment.

sudo apt-get install -y git curl wget shell locales xclip tmux net-tools less
\ software-properties-common htop wget apt-transport-https ca-certificates mutt

We use pandoc for documentation export from spacemacs.

curl -L -O https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/download/2.7.3/pandoc-2.7.3-1-amd64.deb  
sudo dpkg -i /tmp/pandoc-2.7.3-1-amd64.deb

For additional package management we use node. The code below installs node 12.

sudo curl  -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

For managing secrets we use bitwarden which provides a great cli utility.

export account=[BITWARDEN_ACCOUNT]
sudo npm install -g @bitwarden/cli 
bw login $account

For working with google cloud platform we use the GCP SDK, which provides our cli tools.

# Add the Cloud SDK distribution URI as a package source: 
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/cloud.google.gpg] https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt cloud-sdk main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-cloud-sdk.list

# Import the Google Cloud public key: 
curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/cloud.google.gpg add -

# Update and install the Cloud SDK: 
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install google-cloud-sdk

For cloud infrastructure deployments we use terraforms.

# Download the binary
wget 'https://releases.hashicorp.com/terraform/0.12.9/terraform_0.12.9_linux_amd64.zip'

# Unzip it
unzip *.zip

# Move the binary to path
sudo mv terraform /usr/bin/

# Clean up
rm *amd64.zip

Archive:	terraform_0.12.9_linux_amd64.zip
inflating:	terraform

For ad-hoc system administration we use ansible

sudo yum install -y ansible

Install spacemacs

A key component in our environment is spacemacs. The section below will setup version 27.0.50 of emacs and then spacemacs on top.

git clone -b stable  --depth=1 https://github.com/ii/emacs

sudo apt-get install autoconf make gcc texinfo libgtk-3-dev libxpm-dev libjpeg-dev libgif-dev libtiff5-dev libgnutls28-dev libncurses5-dev

cd /emacs/
./autogen.sh
./configure.sh
make
sudo make install

After compiling and installing emacs we should verify that version 27.0.50 is installed.

emacs --version

Setup a local emacs pacakge mirror

To save time we will setup a local mirror for all the LISP files that we need as part of spacemacs. Depending on your machine and internet connection it may take some time to download, configure and compile.

sudo git clone --depth 1 -b stable https:/github.com/ii/elpa-mirror /usr/local/elpa-mirror

Setup spacemacs within our home folder.

git clone --depth 1 -b stable --recurse-submodules https://github.com/ii/spacemacs.git ~/.emacs.d
ln -sf ~/.emacs.d/private/local/dot-spacemacs/.spacemacs ~/.spacemacs
emacs --batch -l ~/.emacs.d/init.el

Setup mutt email client

For reading email we ideally use a cli based client for fast searching and lightweight mail reading.

The mutt mail client fills these roles well for imap mailboxes.

The first step to setup mutt is to ensure it is installed.

sudo apt-get install mutt

After installing mutt we then need to create configuration directories and files.

mkdir -p ~/.mutt/cache/headers
mkdir ~/.mutt/cache/bodies
touch ~/.mutt/certificates
touch ~/.muttrc

One configuration folders and files exist we just need to populate our user mutt configuration file with a configuration for our particular mail provider.

The example below utilises the bitwarden cli utility for secrets to ensure these are securely gathered at runtime and not stored in the file.

cat > ~/.muttrc << EOF
set ssl_starttls=yes
set ssl_force_tls=yes
set imap_user=`bw get username hosted`
set imap_pass=`bw get password hosted`
set from=`bw get username hosted`
set realname='James Blair'
set folder=imaps://mail.jamesblair.net
set header_cache="~/.mutt/cache/headers"
set message_cachedir="~/.mutt/cache/bodies"
set certificate_file="~/.mutt/certificates"
set smtp_url="smtp://`bw get username hosted`@mail.jamesblair.net:587/"
set smtp_pass=`bw get password hosted`
set move=no
set imap_keepalive=900
set postponed="=Drafts"
set record="=Sent"
set imap_passive=no
set spoolfile=imaps://mail.jamesblair.net/INBOX
EOF

Setup environment dotfiles

Within wsl we can use .dotfiles to further customise our environment. The script below restores my versions of key dotfiles automatically.

git clone ssh://git@gitlab.jamma.life:2224/jmhbnz/tooling.git
cd /tooling/
mv * ~/