Enabling network connectivity in WSL 2 windows and running docker in windows.

Praveen David Mathew
2 min readAug 29, 2021

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Install wsl2:

follow the steps:

follow the manual steps in:

Note: RESTART your system after step 2 before proceeding to step 4 in above guide

After step 5 follow the below steps

Install distros:

we use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Launch Ubuntu:

launch Ubuntu by typing Ubuntu in start menu

setup the system by providing any username and password of your choice

Enabling network connectivity:

OK this is the tricky part ,

the hack I do is ,

  1. first switch the distros into wsl 1 and install ifconfig

to do this open powershell as admin and run:

wsl -l -v 

copy the name and then switch the distro wsl version

wsl.exe --set-version Ubuntu-20.04 1

now launch ubuntu again and install ifconfig

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt install net-tools

now switch back to wsl 2:

wsl.exe --set-version Ubuntu-20.04 2

Check wsl lan network ip by running ipconfig in powershell

ipconfig

Now launch ubuntu again and check eth0

you can observe that the network is down , so you have to configure it properly as:

sudo ifconfig eth0 <IPv4 address in samenetwork> netmask <samenetmask>
sudo route add default gw <ipaddressofwindowswsl>

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Praveen David Mathew

An open source advocator/WebdriverIO Projectcommiter/Postman Supernova/Postman-html-extra contributor/Stack overflow sqa moderator/Speaker