Keeping your WSL Linux instances up to date automatically within Windows 10

Hayden Barnes from Canonical, the folks that work on Ubuntu (lovely blog, check out it) had a great tweet where he recommended using the Windows Task Scheduler (think of it as a graphical cron job manager) to keep your WSL Linux instances up to date.

There's a few things to unpack here to get into the details.

First, if you run wsl --list -v you'll see all the WSL Linux Instances on your machine.

> wsl --list -v

  NAME                   STATE           VERSION

* Ubuntu-18.04           Running         2

  kali-linux             Stopped         1

  Alpine                 Stopped         1

  Ubuntu-20.04           Stopped         2

  WLinux                 Running         2

  docker-desktop-data    Stopped         2

  docker-desktop         Stopped         2

You can I see I have a few. I spend most of my time in the Ubuntu instances, but I also occasionally drop into the kali-linux and WLinux instances. If I'm using LTS (long term support) distros then there's minimal risk (my opinion) in "apt get update" and "apt get upgrade"-ing them every week or so. I could even do it unattended.

I could set up a Task Scheduler and make an "on login" task or a weekly task that calls wsl.exe and passes in -d for distro, along with the name of the distro, run as root with -u and -e for the command. For example:

wsl -d "Wlinux" -u root -e apt update

wsl -d "Wlinux" -u root -e apt upgrade -y

Since I have several WSL instances, I could also make a "updateall.cmd" or .bat or .ps1 script and run them occasionally to keep them all updated on my own. Just change the -d and include the name of each distro. One could imagine a group policy as well for large enterprises to do the same thing for developers using a custom or managed WSL instance.

You would not want to update or mess with the docker- managed WSL instances above as they exist only to run your Docker Desktop-managed containers. Leave that to Docker to manage.

It's a whole new world out there, and I'm loving how I can move easily between multiple Linuxes on Windows 10. Check out my YouTube on WSL2 and please subscribe over there.

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