As I have a new laptop to go with the new job I am setting up my usual toolset on it.
One thing I need is the ability to run containers locally, ideally grouped via docker-compose as I have a few personal projects that already use it.
Unfortunately, Docker Desktop, is no longer free to use and requires a licence for large enterprises like Very. I quick google search leads me to this article on running docker on WSL without Docker Desktop.
The article itself indicates that using podman would be a nice and maybe easier alternative, as Podman doesn’t require a daemon, whereas docker needs systemd and WSL2 doesn’t have systemd out of the box.
Podman can now also run docker-compose files, therefore I am going to try that first and follow this other article by the same author : Using podman instead of docker on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2)
Install WSL2
Using these instructions.
Upgrade Ubuntu to 21.04
Unfortunately, the WSL2 install will only deploy the latest LTS version of the corresponding Linux distribution.
For Ubuntu, this is 20.04 LTS which was published in April (04) 2020.
However, the Podman installation package is included in the native repositories of Ubuntu since 20.10, and the latest (tho not LTS) version is Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo).
As this is meant to be my sandbox for learning, I might as well upgrade to 21.04.
I’ll use these instructions.
However, these hit an undocumented snag, once again caused by the absence of systemd in WSL.
The explanation and the fix for this is documented here.
Install Podman
I follow the official instructions, which, now that I am running on 21.04, consist of:
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get -y install podman
NB: on Ubuntu, we need to add docker.io as a default search registry in order to pull containers by their short name (see Shortnames are broken in 3.0.0 due to missing list of unqualified-search registries ), by adding this line to /etc/containers/registries.conf:
unqualified-search-registries=["docker.io"]
Alias vs-code
Thanks to Visual Studio Code (vscode) Remote - WSL extension, I can launch my favourite IDE from WSL2 command line: code ..
Actually I can’t because I run Visual Studio Code (vscode) Insider Build coz I’m a software architect, code mostly for fun and can therefore live with a potentially unstable environment.
The executable for this is an unyieldy code-insider.
No problem, I just need to alias the command, which I barely remembered how to do 
: edit ~/.bashrc and add a line that reads alias code='code-insiders'.
Install Git
WSL basically installs its own file system, therefore, when developing in WSL2, I need a separate workspace and a separate instance of git.
Follow these instructions, in particular the bit about the credential manager.
And that’s me done… I actually haven’t run any container yet, I’ll need to resurrect some old project of mine, or start a new one…