Comet Components is an active work in progress. These docs and the code currently available via GitHub and Packagist should be considered an incomplete alpha release.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

Info

WSL = Windows Subsystem for Linux. It allows you to run a Linux terminal within Windows, which provides a Bash shell as opposed to the Command Prompt or PowerShell.

This enables you to use Bash commands (which are much more common in web development documentation and tutorials than PowerShell or CMD), as well as tools like Oh My ZSH and plugins like autosuggestions and syntax highlighting.

Installing WSL

You can install WSL through PowerShell or through the Microsoft Store by finding your Linux distribution of choice, such as Debian or Ubuntu.

Note

There are two versions of WSL: WSL1 and WSL2. WSL1 provides a simple terminal that integrates with the Windows filesystem and applications, whereas WSL2 provides a complete Linux kernel in a virtual machine.

All documentation in this site that refers to WSL has been written while using WSL1 with Debian. All commands are the same for Ubuntu, which is a commonly documented option elsewhere.

You can fnd out more about the differences in the Microsoft docs - Comparing WSL Versions.

Using WSL

You can open your WSL terminal in the Windows Terminal app. You can set it as the default tab in Settings > Default profile.

If it isn't the default, you can select it in the new tab options:

terminal-app.png

PhpStorm works very similarly, and you can set it to be your default terminal in Settings > Tools > Terminal by entering the path to wsl.exe in the Shell path field:

phpstorm-terminal.png

Setting up PHP, Node, etc for use in the WSL terminal

The tool-specific guides in this site cover WSL usage options:

The TL;DR is that you can either install things natively in WSL or use the Windows versions via aliases and/or symlinks.

To add aliases to your .bashrc or .zshrc file to point to the Windows executables:

alias composer='powershell.exe /c C:\\Users\\LeesaWard\\.config\\herd\\bin\\composer.bat' # Use Windows Composer as set by Herd
alias php='powershell.exe /c C:\\Users\\LeesaWard\\.config\\herd\\bin\\php.bat' # Use Windows PHP as set by Herd
alias sass="powershell.exe sass -c \$(wslpath -w \$1)'" # Use Dart Sass installed via Chocolatey
alias node='/mnt/c/Program\ Files/nodejs/node.exe' # Use Windows Node; this can be controlled via Herd
alias npm='powershell.exe /c npm' # Use Windows NPM

You can also set PHP to use specific versions installed anywhere in Windows. For details and examples see the PHP on Windows guide.