The best way to run WSO2 Identity Server on Windows 10 with a Windows Subsystem for Linux

3 min readJan 11, 2021

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a new Windows 10 feature that enables you to run native Linux command-line tools directly on Windows, alongside your traditional Windows desktop and modern store apps.
— Microsoft

WSL is a feature of Windows provided by Microsoft which allows Linux tools and programs to run on top of the Windows 10 operating system.
It allows developers to get the advantage of both the user-friendly Windows operating system and the developer-friendly environment of the Linux operating system. Using WSL, Linux features such as bash shell and Linux tools can be run on top of the Windows operating system.
It will simply open up a windows console running the bash shell, where you can run your commands. The good thing about this is it allows you to access your local disk drives which are mounted to the /mnt folder.

But why should you use a WSL rather than a virtual machine?

WSL requires few resources than a VM
Allows you to run Linux specific tools and apps alongside windows tools and apps
Can access windows file system with Linux shell

Visit Microsoft to find more on WSL

Let’s get started!

Install WSL

Go to Control Panel and then click Programs, under Programs and Features click Turn Windows features on or off.

2. Tick the Windows Subsystem for Linux option.

Then windows will install WSL. After installation restart the computer

Install a Linux distribution

Go to Microsoft store and search for the distribution you prefer.

Select the distribution (Here I used Ubuntu 18.04 LTS) and click install
After installation, you can open the bash shell by searching for Ubuntu on Windows 10 search.

After a few minutes of installations, you will be prompted to create a new user with a username and a password. Finally, you will get a bash shell where you can run commands.

Installations on WSL

Install JAVA
You can follow normal JAVA installation steps. Make sure you set the environmental variables for JAVA.
Install unzip
sudo apt-get install unzip

Download WSO2 Identity Server

You can visit wso2 releases on Github (https://github.com/wso2/product-is/releases) and download the latest release. (Here I used wso2is-5.11.0). After downloading you will get a zip file.