Visual Studio Code and WSL2

I’m not the only one playing around with running Jekyll in WSL2 for my blog:

Been playing with converting my blog to @Jekyllrb But compile times were bad.

WSL2 + blog on /mnt/c/source/blog -> 60s
WSL2 + blog inside the native linux filesystem ~/blog -> 0.5s

Seems the WSL notes on I/O perf hit when going through filesystem bridge is real @richturn_ms

— Ðavid Ƀurela (@DavidBurela) May 10, 2020

Inspired by David’s tweet, I figured it was time I gave it a go. It was remarkably easy!

First, make sure I’m on the WSL2 disk (not the mounted Windows disk)

cd

Now pull down my blog repo

git clone https://github.com/flcdrg/flcdrg.github.io.git

Start Visual Studio Code in the current directory

code .

This magically installed some ‘server’ bits into WSL2

Updating VS Code Server to version d69a79b73808559a91206d73d7717ff5f798f23c
Removing previous installation...
Installing VS Code Server for x64 (d69a79b73808559a91206d73d7717ff5f798f23c)
Downloading: 100%
Unpacking: 100%
Unpacked 2321 files and folders to /home/david/.vscode-server/bin/d69a79b73808559a91206d73d7717ff5f798f23c.

and then Visual Studio Code launched

But how can I save screenshots and other images now that the repo is stored inside WSL2? Easy as it turns out. I right-clicked on the assets folder in Code and chose Reveal in Explorer and it brings up Windows Explorer pointing to an internal share mapped back to the Linux disk. I can access the same path from the snipping tool too!

And how fast is Jekyll?

bundle exec jekyll serve --incremental 2>&1 | grep -E -v 'deprecated|GitHub Metadata'

On Windows: 120 seconds

On Linux: 62 seconds

JSON to Environment Converter

I made a thing!

I needed to translate some JSON configuration (like the appsettings.json file used by ASP.NET Core) into equivalent environment variables (so that they could be set in a Dockerfile). Rather than try and figure it out, I created a simple web tool to do the conversion for me.

1. Paste your JSON into the first text field
2. Select the formatting options
   1. Dockerfile-style or Yaml (suitable for docker-compose.yml or azure-pipelines.yml)
   2. Whether to include entries with a key but no value
   3. Use colons or underscores as separators
3. Press Convert
4. Review and/or copy the text that appears in the second text field.

You can find it at https://jsontoenvironmentconverter.azurewebsites.net/, and the source code is at https://github.com/flcdrg/JsonToEnvironmentConverter

In the garden - May 2020

We had a long dry summer, but autumn has arrived, with what feels like a sneak peek of winter with some really good soaking rains in the last few weeks.

I was early to buy some vegetable seedlings to plant ahead for winter. English spinach, rainbow chard (silverbeet), spring onions, broccoli and bok choy. The spinach and bok choy have grown quickly and we’ve enjoyed them in a few stir fries already. I’m hoping the broccoli flowers soon.

I planted the capsicums way back at the start of summer and they’ve taken ages to mature. Other years, the fruit are just starting to appear when winter appears and the plants give up. This time I’ve had success. (Also a feature of the stir-fries)

The fruit trees are doing well. We’ve finished the gala apples, and the ‘pink lady’ are just coming into season now. They are deceptive as they’ve pinked up beautifully on the side that gets sun, but on the shady side they’re still quite green.

The lemon tree has been struggling for a number of years. It would flower and tiny fruit would set, but then it would all fall off over summer. A couple of years ago we had a professional fruit tree pruner come in and give us some advice. He suggested giving the tree some protection around the base as it might have been getting too much direct sun. That seems to have done the trick as this year the fruit stayed on the tree and as you can see the fruit is getting close to ripe!

The mandarin is heavy with fruit and it’s just coming into season. I love the flavour of our fruit - so much tastier than the shop varieties.

My dad has an impressive strawberry patch. He gave me some runners a few weeks ago and I’m pleased that most of them look like they’ve taken. These ones are in the area that our chooks scratch, so I provided the plants with some ‘chicken protection’ until they’re established.