{"id":7280,"date":"2021-09-07T16:30:36","date_gmt":"2021-09-07T15:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/?p=7280"},"modified":"2021-09-08T15:33:42","modified_gmt":"2021-09-08T14:33:42","slug":"using-singularity-on-windows-with-wsl2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/using-singularity-on-windows-with-wsl2\/","title":{"rendered":"Using Singularity on Windows with WSL2"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Previously on this blog, my colleagues Carlos<\/a> and Eoin<\/a> have extolled the many virtues of Singularity, which I will not repeat here. Instead, I’d like to talk about a rather interesting subject that was unexpectedly thrust upon me when my faithful Linux laptop started to show the early warning signs of critical existence failure: is there a good way to run a Singularity container on a pure Windows machine? It turns out that, with version 2 of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), there is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Installing WSL2 and a Linux distribution<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

First, we’ll need to set up WSL2. If you’ve already done this, you can jump to the fun part. If you’re on the Windows Insiders Program<\/a> and have installed the latest preview build, you can simply use the new wsl install command, which will install WSL2 and a default Ubuntu distribution. To do this, in a terminal with administrator privileges, simply run:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

wsl --install<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
You can install different distributions using:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
wsl --install -d <Distribution Name><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
You can see the names of available distributions by running:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
wsl --list --online<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
If you’re not using a preview build (perhaps because you like your system to just work, thank you very much<\/em>) you’ll have to enable and install WSL2 the old fashioned way. First, we need to enable some system settings that are required for WSL2. We can do this the GUI way or the terminal way – here I’ll show you both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To enable WSL2 features through the GUI, open ‘Turn windows features on or off’ from the search bar. This will open a list of options for you to enable or disable. Ensure that the following options are checked:<\/p>\n\n\n\n