In the past, I posted about different ways to create development environments. These were the posts:

Historically, I have worked heavily on solutions deployed to Linux, either via Cloud PaaS services like Azure Container Apps or AKS. However, my professional workstation has always been Windows. My tooling varies, but I mostly use VS Code and whatever terminal is available. Any AI tooling I use is also typically terminal-based. In this post, I will detail a hybrid approach where the code and tools live in Linux, but the IDE is hosted in Windows. The reasoning for this setup is that my workstation is Windows and powerful enough that leveraging ephemeral cloud environments is not quite necessary.

NOTE: I’ve tested these instructions using Windows 11 for the host and Ubuntu or Debian Linux distros. You may need to adjust them accordingly for other distros.

TL;DR

Use WSL2 in Windows 11, create a WSL VM, disable WSL automount and interop so it is reasonably isolated from the host, and finally connect to it via WSL on the terminal and SSH on VS Code.

Installing WSL on Host

Follow official documentation. But in short:

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# Run as administrator to install WSL and the required Windows features.
# If [Distro] is not provided, Ubuntu is installed by default.
wsl --install [Distro]

After download and install, provide a username and password and you have a basic VM ready to go.

This process will create a .vhdx and .ico in c:\Users\username\AppData\Local\wsl\{guid}. It will also register the distro with WSL to create an actual VM and show it in Windows as an App. Finally, it initializes an account, configures networking with the host, and maps your local drives under /mnt.

For an isolated environment, I heavily recommend you prevent the local drive mapping and disable interop with Windows. For instance, if you want to run Claude Code or GitHub Copilot in your new VM with fewer restrictions, allowing it to potentially see your host drives is a bad idea.

Isolate the VM from Host

In general, I want my VMs to be reasonably isolated from my host. The top 2 changes I do are to prevent WSL from auto-mounting the host drives and stop adding Windows PATH to Linux PATH. To make these changes, modify wsl.conf on your VM using sudo nano /etc/wsl.conf to add:

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# Prevents fixed drives (i.e. c:\) to be automatically mounted under /mnt
[automount]
enabled=false
 
# Disable launching Windows processes and prevent adding Windows path elements to $PATH env variable
[interop]
enabled=false
appendWindowsPath=false

Shutdown the WSL instance with wsl --terminate <distroName>. When you open the distro again, it will have the new configuration.

NOTE: if you do a ls /mnt/c the mount will still be there but ls will return nothing.

NOTE 2: you can still access the VM’s file system from the Windows host.

Setup SSH

Given we disabled interop and path sharing, SSH is the best way to connect to the VM from VS Code. On the VM, I typically use openssh-server to handle SSH connections. Because you are sharing networking with the host and port 22 is likely already being used by Windows, you should use another port. I like using 2222 and above for each VM.

Install openssh-server in the VM:

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sudo apt install openssh-server -y

Configure the port to something other than the default 22:

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sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
# uncomment PORT and set the value to 2222

Restart openssh-server:

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sudo systemctl restart ssh

Now that SSH is set up, access it from your host to setup trust. This will create the .ssh\config file which will be used by VS Code later. To connect to the VM from your host, use:

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ssh user@localhost -p 2222

Use VSCode with SSH

Because we have disabled Windows interop, typing code . on your WSL terminal will not work. To connect to your VM using VS Code, first install the extension on your host:

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# Install the extension
code --install-extension ms-vscode-remote.remote-ssh
# Port is not necessary for VS Code as it will respect Windows .ssh/config
# Connecting for the first time will install and setup VS Code remote server
code --remote ssh-remote+user@host /path-to-remote-folder

NOTE: If you have multiple VMs set up, change the hostname in the .ssh\config

Install oh-my-posh [Optional]

To install oh-my-posh on your VM, follow these steps.

If running a distro that doesn’t have curl by default (e.g., Debian), install it:

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sudo apt update
sudo apt install curl

Install unzip:

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sudo apt install unzip

Install oh-my-posh:

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curl -s https://ohmyposh.dev/install.sh | bash -s

If needed, add oh-my-posh to your $PATH. Then, add oh-my-posh init to ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc:

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nano ~/.profile
# eval "$(oh-my-posh init bash)"

Create Multiple VMs [Optional]

I typically keep a template VM for when I change projects but they still have similar tooling requirements. In that case, I want to prepare a VM, keep it as a template and just duplicate it for each project. Using wsl --install [Distro] only works when installing a different distro. To duplicate an existing distro, you need to export and import the WSL VM:

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# Debian is the distro name
wsl --export Debian c:\VMs\Debian.tar

# replace username with your Windows user
# note the folder will be a bit different from other VMs as it will be a name instead of GUID
wsl --import Debian2 c:\Users\username\AppData\Local\wsl\Debian2 c:\VMs\Debian.tar

WSL defaults to using root for imported VMs. Once the import is complete, modify the default user:

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# replace username with the Linux user you created on the copied VM
wsl --manage Debian2 --set-default-user username

Adjust Memory Available to WSL [Optional]

WSL will hold on to memory it allocates. By default, up to 50% of the host RAM can be allocated to the WSL VM. You can either limit it or set the experimental feature autoMemoryReclaim to reduce memory issues. To do it, create a .wslconfig in your user directory (typically c:\users\yourname\) with the following content:

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[wsl2]
memory=8GB

[Experimental]
# options are disabled (default), gradual, and dropCache
autoMemoryReclaim=dropCache

For a list of all options, see the docs at Microsoft Learn

Cheers,
Lucas