Docker Powershell WSL

Recently I had to return to working on Windows and didn’t want to install any docker desktop client as I didn’t need it and I wanted to share my docker socket from WSL with Powershell instead of having it installed on Windows and WSL.

Here is how I achieved it:

• Install Windows Docker CLI
• Install Docker in WSL .

  Be sure to follow the post install

• In WSL, create this file if it doesn’t exist /etc/docker/daemon.json and ensure it hosts is set like this

{
  "hosts": ["unix:///var/run/docker.sock", "tcp://localhost:2375"]
}

• Back in Windows, create an environment variable DOCKER_HOST with the value tcp://localhost:2375​

Now from within Powershell your docker will connect to the instance running in WSL.

If you also want it to autostart on boot, there’s a few more steps.

• Create a .vbs script in your Start Folder (%ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp) with the following:

Set ws \= CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
ws.run "wsl", vbhide

• Update your systemd docker scirpt in WSL. There are several approaches outlines here .