Easily move WSL distributions between Windows 10 machines with import and export...

My colleague Tara and I were working on prepping a system for Azure IoT development and were using WSL2 on our respective machines. The scripts we were running were long-running and tedious and by the time they were done we basically had a totally customized perfect distro.

Rather than sharing our scripts and having folks run them for hours, we instead decided to export the distro and import it on n number of machines. That way Tara could set up the distro perfectly and then give it to me.

For example, when using PowerShell I can do this:

C:\Users\Scott\Desktop> wsl --export PerfectWSLDistro ./PerfectWSLDistro.tar

Then I can share the resulting tar and give it to a friend and they can do this! (Note that I'm using ~ which is your home directory from PowerShell. If you're using cmd.exe you'll want to include the full path like c:\users\scott\Appdata\Local\PerfectDistro)

mkdir ~/AppData/Local/PerfectDistro
wsl --import PerfectDistro ~/AppData/Local/PerfectDistro ./PerfectWSLDistro.tar --version 2

You can list our your WSL distros like this:

C:\Users\Scott\Desktop> wsl --list -v
  NAME            STATE           VERSION
* Ubuntu-18.04    Stopped         2
  WLinux          Stopped         2
  Debian          Stopped         1
  PerfectDistro   Stopped         2

It's surprisingly easy! Also, make sure you have the latest version of the Windows Terminal ( and if you've got an old version and haven't deleted your profile.json, it's time to start fresh ) it will automatically detect your WSL distros and make menu items for them!

Also be sure to check out my YouTube video on developing with WSL2 !

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