Docker Engine on WSL + Visual Studio 2019 without Docker Desktop

Prerequisite

• Install WSL version 2 (see Microsoft documentation)

• Install Linux (personally I choose Ubuntu)

• Install Visual Studio 2019

• Clone this repository

Configure WSL

You maybe need to configure WSL to limit processor and memory usage.

This can be done with the file .wslconfig in your Windows profile folder (%USERPROFILE%).

[wsl2]
memory=4GB # Limits VM memory in WSL 2 up to 4GB
processors=2 # Makes the WSL 2 VM use two virtual processors

See Microsoft documentation.

Install Docker tools

Install Docker

From Docker documentation :

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl gnupg lsb-release
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg
echo \
  "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
  $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io
sudo docker run hello-world

You will have an error here :

Docker service didn’t start automatically in WSL, even if you reboot Ubuntu, since systemd is not enabled.

You can start it manually :

sudo service docker start

Allow Docker without sudo (see Docker post installation documentation)

sudo groupadd docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker
docker run hello-world

Install Docker Compose

sudo apt update
sudo apt install docker-compose

Start multi-container with Docker Compose

This docker-compose.yml is configured to start a Kafka environment and the listener application. If you open it, you will see the listener configuration :

services:
  listener:
    container_name: listener
    image: ${DOCKER_REGISTRY-}listener
    depends_on:
      - rest-proxy
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: KafkaListener/Dockerfile
    ports:
      - "80"
    environment:
      ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT: Development
      ASPNETCORE_URLS: http://+:80
      ConsumerConfig__BootstrapServers: kafka:9092
      ConsumerConfig__GroupId: wsl-consumer
      ListenerConfig__Host: http://172.17.0.1:5002
      ListenerConfig__Route: /hello
      ListenerConfig__Topic: hello-topic

The address 172.17.0.1 is the address of Docker.

So let’s start the environment:

docker-compose up -d --build && docker attach listener

Now let’s start the application to rename :

dotnet run --project ./WslApplication/WslApplication.csproj --urls "http://172.17.0.1:5002"

Ok, now we send a message to Kafka :

To communicate with the container from Windows, you must use this address [::1].

You should see this message in both applications :

Visual Studio 2019

Open the solution DockerWSL.sln, and choose the WSL profile :

If you have this error, you have to select Ubuntu as the default WSL :

wsl -s Ubuntu-20.04

You may have also those errors :

Just click install and it will work.

Now you can work and debug directly with Visual Studio.

So, the solution work and it’s easy to implement.

The downside I see is that we lose the concept of “Works on my machine” since the application no longer works on Docker but on WSL.

Source: Medium - Frcs6

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