Installing WSL Distro to a different/custom location

This article will let you to manually install any WSL distribution (on MSFT store) of your choice to a different folder or drive location.

By default the Linux distributions installed from the Microsoft Store are available in the same place as other Windows store apps (%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Packages\).

Enabling the WSL windows feature:

In an administrator PowerShell window, run:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

and reboot to complete the installation.

Grab the .appx package file:

To download the .appx package of a distro directly, run the following in PowerShell:

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://aka.ms/wslubuntu2004 -OutFile Ubuntu.appx -UseBasicParsing

This will download Ubuntu 20.04 distro and save it under the name “Ubuntu.appx”

Available Distros:

Ubuntu 20.04 - https://aka.ms/wslubuntu2004

Ubuntu 20.04 ARM - https://aka.ms/wslubuntu2004arm

Ubuntu 18.04 - https://aka.ms/wsl-ubuntu-1804

Ubuntu 18.04 ARM - https://aka.ms/wsl-ubuntu-1804-arm

Ubuntu 16.04 - https://aka.ms/wsl-ubuntu-1604

Debian GNU/Linux - https://aka.ms/wsl-debian-gnulinux

Kali Linux - https://aka.ms/wsl-kali-linux-new

OpenSUSE Leap 42 - https://aka.ms/wsl-opensuse-42

SLES - https://aka.ms/wsl-sles-12

Unpack the distro:

Navigate to the directory and extract the package. Extract to a folder that has full access permission.

You can unzip the downloaded package using any archiver of your choice, or you can simply do it via PowerShell itself:

move .\Ubuntu.appx .\Ubuntu.zip
Expand-Archive .\Ubuntu.zip

Initializing

In the unzipped folder there’s an EXE file (according to the name of the distribution)

* Based on the version of Linux distro you are using, the executable name can be different.

Now, run the executable to start initializing…

This will extract the “rootfs” and Register the WSL.

NOTE: You can register with a different name using wsl — import and perform multiple installs :)

wsl.exe --import <DistributionName> <InstallLocation> <FileName>

Eg:

wsl.exe --import Debian1 D:\Deb1 .\install.tar.gz

Wait till the process completes and you’ll be prompted to create a new user account and rest of the process follows accordingly.

After the installation is complete, you’ll find the “rootfs” folder is created which has all the libraries, executables etc…

To verify installation use wsl --list --all or wsl -l --allto list names of installed or imported WSL distros.

Adding to PATH

You’ll have to use the distribution launcher application in target folder every time to run your distro. So, additionally you can add your distro path to PATH environment variable to invoke it from anywhere.

$userenv = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable(“Path”, “User”) [System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable(“PATH”, $userenv + “;D:\DebianWSL”, “User”)

Useful Links:

Manually download Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) Distros

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/user-support?redirectedfrom=MSDN