In general, Docker and containers are something every developer has to get familiar with sooner or later. Let’s take a look at installing Docker Desktop on Windows 10, how it integrates with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2, and how to use Laravel’s new command-line tool Laravel Sail to get up and running with Laravel in no time.

Prerequisites

1. Windows 10, version 1903 or higher
2. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2

1. Install Docker Desktop

First, make sure you have the prerequisites installed before continuing with the installation. You can find instructions on how to enable WSL 2 in this article:

Download and follow the…

If you have ever used the terminal on macOS, you probably know that you can use the open command to open any file or directory with its default application. To my knowledge, there is no straightforward way to do this on Windows using WSL2, and this has bugged me a little lately. Sometimes you just want to open a PDF or a ZIP or any other filetype or path using its associated Windows application.

Solution

After some tinkering around, here’s the simple solution I came up with:

Add this function to your .bashrc or .zshrc or equivalent, depending on what…

Think about how often you repeat yourself when generating new models, migrations, factories, and so on using Artisan’s make commands. As of Laravel 7, you have the option of publishing these stubs to your project. Let me show you how.