RHEL9 image for to use as WSL2 development distribution.

This effort is a result of corrupted build mounts in dev containers.

• https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2020/07/01/containers-wsl
• https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-desktop-wsl-2-best-practices/

Run the tools/dev/builds.sh bash script.

See tools/dev/builds.sh --help for details.

You can use the Git Bash terminal that comes with Git for Windows or you could try your default WSL distribution.

This image is based on the RHEL9 UBI image and requires a RHEL subscription, such as a free developer subscription.

The WSL container requires you register your subscription and assumes you have an environment variable named RHEL_ORG defined with your organization and an environment variable named RHEL_ACTIVATION_KEY defined with your activation key identifier.

Once the development image is available in WSL, enable WSL integration in Docker Desktop settings for this specific distro under Settings > Resources > WSL Integration > Enable integration with additional distros.

You may run this script repeatedly to wipe the existing distro and replace it with a clean build. This script removes the distribution if it already exists.

Launch your new wsl dev env with wsl -d wsl-rhel9 or by using the wsl-rhel9 shortcut added to Terminal.

Within the wsl-rhel9 env, simply navigate to the desired project directory and launch code ..

On the first launch, vscode will automatically use wget to download and install vscode server in the WSL image.

From there, you can cleanly build your dev containers from within the WSL env.

User specific .gitconfig can be problematic across various users. Instead of copying the existing user .gitconfig into the container, a temporary file is created with the user.name and user.email from the host machine and seeded in the WSL image, then modified to ensure core standard configurations including windows git credential manager support.

This means that when you enter your git user name and token in windows, that credential manager is accessible from within the WSL distro making cloning simple and seamless from within the WSL env.

Additionally, when you create a dev container from this WSL distro with the credential helper configured, the container automatically shares the credentials thanks to the VS Code Dev Container extension, per https://code.visualstudio.com/remote/advancedcontainers/sharing-git-credentials.

Install k8s tools into the wsl distro using the --k8s argument.

k8s tools have been installed per https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/.