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2.1. Installing WSL

Should you use WSL?

If you do not plan on building out pipelines or apps that are run on the cloud, running Python for Windows is fine.

However if you plan to productionise code and deploy pipelines and apps to the cloud then it is highly recommended to use WSL.

WSL is an important tool for productionising code, as our code needs to run on other machines, particularly those in the cloud.

Cloud compute is nearly always using the Linux operating system, and if writing code on Windows and deploying to Linux, it's very difficult to ensure the code won't run differently.

If developing locally we can either use a Linux machine, or use WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) on a Windows machine. This alongside Docker (covered in the productionising module), allows us to build code that will run exactly the same regardless of what machine it is running on.

How to install WSL

  1. In your search bar type 'Turn Windows features on or off' and open.

  2. Enable 'Virtual Machine Platform' and 'Windows Sybsystem for Linux'

  3. Restart

  4. Open command prompt (searching cmd in search), type wsl --status to confirm WSL has installed.

  5. Type wsl --update

  6. Open Microsoft Store and search for Ubuntu, check the description to make sure it's the version for WSL, and install.

  7. Open Ubuntu, and a window will open asking for UNIX user, type this in and press enter, and do the same with the password.