Devbox with linux OS

Question

Hi,

Can i create a devbox with Linux OS instead of Windows OS ?
If yes, please share me the steps on how to achieve the same.

Thank you,

Uday

Answer 1

Not directly - but you can use WSL - follow https://devblogs.microsoft.com/develop-from-the-cloud/effectively-building-linux-apps-with-microsoft-dev-box-and-wsl/#setting-up-wsl-on-dev-box

Since WSL is available for most modern version of Windows, it is available in Microsoft Dev Box as well, and there are a few ways to enable WSL on Microsoft Dev Box:

• Install manually following the public installation docs
• Install on Dev Box creation with Dev Box customizations (via Dev Portal or Dev Home Integration)

The first option offers the same experience as installing WSL on any Windows machine, whether it is a VM or PC. The second option, however, takes advantage of a feature in Microsoft Dev Box called customizations, which allows you to pre-configure a dev environment on-top of a specific image while the dev box is being created. This approach is particularly useful when you need to create environments often because it automates much of the setup process. In order to configure WSL on Dev Box in this way, you need to follow a few prerequisites, which are defined here. After you have enabled Dev Box customizations on your Dev Center, you can then create a configuration file that has a task to do the following:

• Install a version of Linux to run with WSL (Ubuntu, for instance)
• Create the user that will login to WSL. Configure it and set it to the default user
• Install any software you want on WSL (Python, pyenv, etc.)
• Install Docker Desktop and Visual Studio Code Remote WSL Extension to run VS Code against the WSL instance.

NOTE: This approach uses Dev Box customizations at the individual level, but can also apply customizations at the team level to give everyone who creates a dev box under a certain project the same developer environment. To learn more, read the announcement blog post.

The complete solution to do complete the above steps is outlined in this Gist, but it simply consists of two shell scripts that run inside WSL and one Dev Box configuration file that will install the necessary tools on Windows and inject commands into WSL via PowerShell. To create a dev box with this configuration, you would download the .yaml file and upload it when creating the Dev Box like so.

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hth

Marcin