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how-to-setup-wsl.md

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Set up freeCodeCamp on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

Note

Before you follow these instructions make sure your system meets the requirements

WSL 2: Windows 10 64-bit (Version 2004, Build 19041 or higher) - available for all distributions including Windows 10 Home.

Docker Desktop for Windows: See respective requirements for Windows 10 Pro and Windows 10 Home

This guide covers some common steps with the setup of WSL2. Once some of the common issues with WSL2 are addressed, you should be able to follow this local setup guide to work with freeCodeCamp on Windows running a WSL distro like Ubuntu.

Enable WSL

Follow the instructions on the official documentation to install WSL1 and followed by upgrading to WSL2.

Install Ubuntu

  1. We recommended using Ubuntu-18.04 or above with WSL2.

    [!NOTE]

    While you may use other non-debian based distros, they all come with their own gotchas and are beyond the scope of this guide.

  2. Update the dependencies for the OS

    sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y

# cleanup
sudo apt autoremove -y

Set up Git

Git comes pre-installed with Ubuntu 18.04, verify your Git version with git --version.

~
❯ git --version
git version 2.25.1

(Optional but recommended) You can now proceed to setting up your ssh keys with GitHub.

Installing a Code Editor

We highly recommend installing Visual Studio Code on Windows 10. It has great support for WSL and automatically installs all the necessary extensions on your WSL distro.

Essentially, you will edit and store your code on Ubuntu-18.04 with VS Code installed on Windows.

If you use IntelliJ Idea, you may need to update your Node interpreter and Npm package manager to what is installed on your WSL distro.

You can check these settings by going to Settings > Languages & Frameworks > Node.js and NPM.

Installing Docker Desktop

Docker Desktop for Windows allows you to install and run databases like MongoDB and other services like NGINX and more. This is useful to avoid common pitfalls with installing MongoDB or other services directly on Windows or WSL2.

Follow the instructions on the official documentation and install Docker Desktop for your Windows distribution.

There are some minimum hardware requirements for the best experience.

Configure Docker Desktop for WSL

Once Docker Desktop is installed, follow these instructions and configure it to use the Ubuntu-18.04 installation as a backend.

This makes it so that the containers run on the WSL side instead of running on Windows. You will be able to access the services over http://localhost on both Windows and Ubuntu.

Install MongoDB from Docker Hub

Once you have configured Docker Desktop to work with WSL2, follow these steps to start a MongoDB service:

  1. Launch a new Ubuntu-18.04 terminal

  2. Pull MongoDB 4.0.x from dockerhub

    docker pull mongo:4.0

  3. Start the MongoDB service at port 27017, and configure it to run automatically on system restarts

    docker run -it \
  -v mongodata:/data/db \
  -p 27017:27017 \
  --name mongodb \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  -d mongo:4.0

  4. You can now access the service from both Windows or Ubuntu at mongodb://localhost:27017.

Installing Node.js and pnpm

We recommend you install the LTS release for Node.js with a node version manager - nvm.

Once installed use these commands to install and use the Node.js version as needed

nvm install --lts

# OR
# nvm install <version>

nvm install 14

# Usage
# nvm use <version>

nvm use 12

Node.js comes bundled with npm, which you can use to install pnpm:

npm install -g pnpm

Set up freeCodeCamp locally

Now that you have installed the pre-requisites, follow our local setup guide to clone, install and setup freeCodeCamp locally on your machine.

Warning

Please note, at this time the set up for Cypress tests (and related GUI needs) are a work in progress. You should still be able to work on most of the codebase.

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