tooling/wsl-setup.org

Windows Subsystem for Linux Setup

• Step 1 - Setup home folder structure
• Step 2 - Update and install packages
• Step 3 - Setup environment dotfiles
• Step 4 - Install iimacs editor
• Step 5 - Setup mutt email client

This guide will walk through setting up Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 10. This particular setup contains my opinionated view of a good foundation and layers on some pairing and development orientated tooling over top.

Caveats: Please note this guide is written for the Debian WSL distribution.

Acknowledgements: Large elements of this wsl setup came about through collaboration with the great people at ii.coop. I encourage you to explore and contribute to their work on gitlab as many elements form a core part of this setup and workflow.

Step 1 - Setup home folder structure

After installing the Debian WSL distribution no folders are present in your home folder.

In this section we create some quick standard folders to keep our home folder somewhat organised.

# Ensure we are in our home folder
cd ~/

# Create a documents folder for our git repositories
mkdir Documents

# Create a downloads folder for temporary objects
mkdir Downloads

Step 2 - 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.

# Install basic utilities
sudo apt-get install -y git locales curl wget xclip tmux net-tools less wget htop screenfetch zip

# Install pre-requisites for compiling emacs
sudo apt-get install -y make gcc libgnutls28-dev libtinfo-dev

# Install dpkg and apt management tools
sudo apt-get install -y software-properties-common apt-transport-https ca-certificates

# Install terminal customisation packages
sudo apt install -y xterm xtermcontrol

We use pandoc for documentation export from spacemacs and other markup conversion tasks.

# Work from our downloads folder
cd ~/Downloads

# Download the latest release (check if newer is available)
curl -L -O https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/download/2.9/pandoc-2.9-1-amd64.deb  

# Install the package with dpkg
sudo dpkg -i pandoc-2.9-1-amd64.deb

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

# Curl down the shell script for adding version 12 of nodejs to apt
sudo curl  -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo bash -

# Install the nodejs package via apt
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

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

This section should be expanded in future to cover setting alias for common bitwarden tasks.

# Set an environment variable with our login email for bitwarden
export account=[BITWARDEN_ACCOUNT]

# Install the bitwarden cli via node package manager
sudo npm install -g @bitwarden/cli 

# Test login to bitwarden
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 then install the Google Cloud SDK & kubectl: 
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install google-cloud-sdk kubectl

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

For ad-hoc system administration we use ansible.

# Install ansible via apt package manager
sudo apt-get install -y ansible

Step 3 - 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/
cp .* ~/

Step 4 - Install iimacs editor

A key component in our environment is the ii extension of spacemacs. The section below will setup emacs version 26.3 and then layer the ii version of spacemacs on top.

Our first step is to download the base emacs 26.3 source code.

# Work from our downloads directory
cd ~/Downloads/

# Download the tarball for emacs 26.3 source code
wget https://mirror.ossplanet.net/gnu/emacs/emacs-26.3.tar.xz

# Untar the source code archive
tar xf emacs-26.3.tar.xz

# Change to the extracted directory
cd emacs-26.3.tar.xz

After downloading and untarring the source code we are ready to attempt resolving dependencies and compiling.

We configure without-x as this environment is solely focussed on running within terminal i.e. emacs -nw.

# Run configure to resolve any dependencies minus x window support
./configure --without-x

# Compile the application with make, using all available cpu cores
sudo make -j `nproc`

# Run make install to move/install compiled binaries
sudo make install

After compiling and installing emacs we should verify that version 26.3 is installed.

emacs --version

Once the right version of emacs is running we can then layer in iimacs on top Documentation for this is here: https://github.com/iimacs/.emacs.d

cd ~/ # do as your own user
git clone --recursive https://github.com/iimacs/.emacs.d ~/.iimacs.d

Add the following to your bashrc: export IIMACS=~/.iimacs.d export PATH=${IIMACS}/bin:${PATH} export EMACSLOADPATH=${IIMACS}:

You can now start emacs :)

Step 5 - 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