Running a RHEL-based WSL

Introduction

This blog explains how you can create your own WSL image based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and why you would want to use WSL in the first place.

What is WSL?

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (which could be considered to be a Linux subsystem for Windows) is a Windows feature which allows you to run a Linux distribution within your Windows setup. It uses a Microsoft-provided Linux kernel and tight integration with the Windows host operating system. Microsoft offers several distributions via its Marketplace, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not one of them.

You can start your Linux distro from the Windows command line (cmd or powershell) by typing wsl --distribution <DistroName>. Next you’ll end up in the login shell of your Distro. WSL has created a NAT interface for you so your Linux distro has network connectivity to the outside world. All Windows drives are mounted as /mnt/<DriveLetter>.

Why would you need such a WSL? Suppose you are writing ansible playbooks. You can use VS Code, as it has nice code editing features and an ansible and yaml extension. However in order to use the ansible-lint integration, you need to be able to run ansible - but it’s not possible to run ansible on Windows. Now VS Code has WSL integration built in via a “remote development” extension, allowing you to edit your code inside the WSL image and thus providing access to any tool present in the WSL image, like ansible-lint etc.

So write your ansible code inside your WSL image using the Remote - WSL extension, save the file and see ansible-lint directly verify your file in the VS Code editor window! And if you would want to run the code with ansible-navigator, you could even use the same Execution Environment in this WSL that is meant to be used in your Ansible Automation Platform setup.

What about the RHEL WSL?

As said, Microsoft offers several WSL images via its Marketplace, but not RHEL. If you would want to have a RHEL WSL, you were quite on your own with maybe a bit of help from Google. But not anymore: at Red Hat Summit 2025 it’s officially announced that you can create WSL images for RHEL 8, 9 and 10 using Red Hat’s image builder tool. The downside: there’s still no RHEL image in the Microsoft Marketplace (but there is now a Fedora 42 image available). However using the image builder you can really tweak the image to suit your needs. At the same time Red Hat offers WSL2 images in the download section of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Obviously, as it is RHEL, you will need a RHEL subscription in order to use the RHEL WSL image. A developer subscription (free to use, valid for 1 year, available from Red Hat) will work just fine.

Red Hat Image Builder is available through the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console Red Hat customer portal, in the Red hat Enterprise Linux section (“Insights for RHEL”). Start the image builder by selecting Inventory, Images: .

In order to create images with Image Builder, you need to define the blueprint for the image. In this blueprint you specify which RHEL version (8, 9 or 10) and which architecture (x86_64 or aarch64) should be used for the image, and you define the target environment, which can be public cloud (e.g. AWS or Azure), some form of virtualization or … Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

At the time of writing, RHEL-10 has just been released and Ansible Automation Platform is not yet available on RHEL-10. So if you want to build a WSL for Ansible development, use RHEL-9 for now.

In the optional steps of the image creation, you can insert one of your own activation keys so the WSL is automatically registered at Red Hat (Image Builder will attach it to your organization). You can further tweak the WSL image blueprint to your liking, but leave the OpenSCAP and Filesystem configuration on its defaults. A new feature in Image Builder is the option to directly create a user account within the image. This is especially useful for the WSL image, as otherwise you would always work as ‘root’ in the WSL. When all configuration is done, the blueprint can be saved and the WSL image can be created. The result is a tarball (.tar.gz) which is ready for download for a limited period of time.

Creating the WSL

Once the WSL image is created, it’s time to create the actual WSL instance on your Windows host. When the image file is downloaded on the Windows host, it can be imported into WSL with wsl --import <DistroName> <DestinationDir> <FileName> where:

• DistroName is the name of the distribution in your WSL setup
• DestinationDir is the path where the WSL should have its persistent storage
• FileName is the name of the WSL image file

You can directly specify the compressed tar file (.tar.gz); there is no need to first decompress. Next you can start the WSL with wsl -d <DistroName>. If you created a user account during the image creation process, you can directly connect to the wsl as that user with wsl -d <DistroName> -u <UserName>. If you always want to connect as that user, you can make it the default user with wsl --manage <DistroName> --set-default-user <UserName>.