WSL Proxy Files

WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is an awesome bit of innovation by Microsoft that allows you to run Linux inside of Windows 10 without the need for a Virtual Machine. This has several benefits, the largest of which is the memory that you save by not running a whole secondary OS. Unfortunately it also has it's drawbacks, the biggest of which is a distinct lack of support through editors such as Atom, VSCode, and Sublime Text.

The goal of this project is to create a collection of "proxy" batch files that can be used to route requests to the linux version of a command. Almost all of the files will have the same layout

@echo off
bash.exe -c "php %*"

As an example usecase take the atom-linter package. Most of the linters, such as linter-php require the path to an executable in order to run. If that executable is inside of WSL however, there is no way to access it.

Using the wsl-proxy php.bat file however, you can just replace the path to the executable with C:\\Users\\myuser\\path\\to\\wsl-proxy\\php.bat. Requests are now being routed to the linux version of PHP.

Pro tip: If you clone this and add the cloned directory to your windows PATH you will be able to access any of the proxied commands through command prompt (even without the .bat extension)

Note: This is an experiment currently and I can't guarentee it will work with everything, but please feel free to add files here. Let's turn this into a one-stop shop for wsl-proxy files.

Auto-generating proxy files

Run the proxygen.cmd script to automatically generate proxies. A subfolder named .\autogen will be created, and all the autogenned proxy files will be placed here -- add this folder to your Windows PATH if you want access to the proxied commands without typing in a full path.

Usage:

• (No args): proxygen
  Prompts you to enter program names from stdin (press CTRL-D when done).
• (Redirect from file): proxygen < program_name_file
  Same as above, but reads program names from a file.
• (Specify args on command line): proxygen program1 program2 ...

Examples:
proxygen gcc g++
proxygen /usr/bin/foo
proxygen /usr/bin/*
proxygen /usr/bin/* /bin/*

Program names will be resolved to absolute paths. If a program is not found, a warning message will be displayed (the proxy will still be created).