For advanced users who are looking to have a full Linux command-line interface on their Windows machine (which may be helpful for CMPSC 156 work), we recommend using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). WSL is a tool that basically creates a separate Linux environment alongside your Windows environment, with access to your local filesystem. This will allow you to access package managers (such as apt-get for Ubuntu/Debian) and the full suite of UNIX commands.

Note that the reference platform for the course remains “CSIL”; we cannot commit to being “tech support” for every conceivable platform. On your own machine, you are your own tech support. But we’ll help as best we can, given the time constraints we are under.

Compatibility

The first step is ensuring that you have a compatible machine. You will need:

One of the following operating systems:
- Windows 11, any build
- Windows 10, build 16215 or later (but we recommend 18917 or later to use new WSL 2 features and the new Windows Terminal).
Administrator privileges on your machine

Install WSL

On Windows 11 machines and Windows 10 machines with build 19041 or higher, installing WSL is very simple:

Open Command Prompt or PowerShell as administrator
- This can be done by searching for either program in the Start Menu, right-clicking on the result, and selecting “Run as administrator”
Run the following command: wsl --install
- This will enable and install WSL with the default configuration:
  - WSL 2
  - The latest LTS release of Ubuntu (currently 22.04 LTS)
Once installation is complete, launch your distribution from the Windows Start Menu

More information on the above steps can be found here.

If your machine doesn’t meet the criteria to use the one-line install command, you can follow the manual installation instructions here. Unless you know exactly what you’re doing, we recommend Ubuntu 22.04 LTS as your distribution. The rest of these instructions assume you installed Ubuntu.

The better / safer solution is to update your Windows 10 machine to a more recent build, so we recommend doing that and using the one-line install command instead.

(Recommended) Install Windows Terminal

For users who want a nicer looking terminal, complete with tabs, full Unicode support (for emojis!), custom colors / fonts, and more customization features, you can optionally install the new Windows Terminal.

Windows Terminal is already the default terminal for Windows 11 users, so no further installation is needed.

For Windows 10 users, you can install Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store.

A note about Line Endings on Windows

Keep in mind that WSL uses UNIX line endings (LF) while Windows uses CRLF line endings. If you check out your code natively in Windows (i.e. using Git Bash or GitHub Desktop), your checked-out code will use CRLF line endings, and therefore may cause Shell scripts (and other programs that parse based on line endings) and Git commits to act differently or fail.

Since most of our work will be done in WSL, you should try to use LF line endings whenever possible.

Install / Update Git on WSL

Ubuntu should come with git, but the pre-installed version is usually outdated (you can check by running git --version).

If the pre-installed version is out-of-date or not installed, run the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:git-core/ppa -y
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git

Successfully running the above commands should install the latest version of Git, which is 2.46.2 as of the time of writing. To verify that the install was successful, run the following command:

git --version

Your output should look like this:

git version 2.46.2

You are now ready to set up your Git environment using the steps below.

Set Up Git on WSL

One thing to note is that Git on WSL does NOT operate in the same environment as native Git on Windows. This means that you will have to generate a new global config and SSH key specific to the WSL environment.

Start by setting your name and email by running the following commands with the appropriate values:

git config --global user.name "Joe Gaucho"
git config --global user.email "joegaucho@ucsb.edu"

Be sure that the listed email is linked to your GitHub account. This is how GitHub is able to attribute a commit to your account, and this will be necessary to receive credit for the code you write. You can check the emails associated with your GitHub account here.

Next, we will need to generate new SSH keys specific to the WSL environment. For instructions on how to do that, take a look at this page. You are welcome to use any type of key pair you would like - GitHub should support most of them, including those backed by physical security keys.

Note: While it’s not entirely necessary to set up SSH keys, since you can always work remotely with repos via HTTPS, using SSH keys just makes using Git easier since you will not have to re-enter your GitHub login information whenever you want to clone a repo or push/pull.

Install Java on WSL

The projects in this class use Java 21, which is the latest LTS release of Java.

To install the latest version of Java 21 JDK, run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openjdk-21-jdk

Successfully running the above commands should install Java 21 JDK. To verify that the install was successful, run the following command:

java --version

Your output should look something like this:

openjdk 21.0.4 ...
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build ...)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build ...)

Install Maven on WSL

The projects in this class use Maven 3.9.9, which is necessary for Java 21.

The apt package manager does not yet have Maven 3.9.9, so we need to manually download and extract Maven.

(As of this writing, the current version of Maven is 3.9.9; but it is possible that by the time you are reading these instructions, the current version may have been updated, and the links to this version will no longer work. If the links appear broken, see if there is a newer version available.)

Here are two links that have been reported to work for downloading Maven 3.9.9 (the only difference is downloads vs. dlcdn)

If the first one doesn’t work, try the second. Note that these links are for use in the commands below, specifically curl.

Note: The first cd command below is to make sure that you are doing the rest of the commands in your “home directory” (i.e. a directory where you have write permission.) Sometimes the shell will put you in a system directory by default where you don’t have write permission; in that case, downloads will fail even if the link and network connections are fine.

cd 
export MAVEN_VERSION=3.9.9
curl -O https://downloads.apache.org/maven/maven-3/${MAVEN_VERSION}/binaries/apache-maven-${MAVEN_VERSION}-bin.tar.gz
tar -zxvf apache-maven-${MAVEN_VERSION}-bin.tar.gz
sudo mv apache-maven-${MAVEN_VERSION} /opt/maven

You may need to prefix some of the above commands with sudo to grant necessary permissions.

Then, add Maven to your PATH by adding the following line to ~/.bashrc:

Your bashrc file can be opened in any text editor, but an easy one is

nano ~/.bashrc

Then, add this line at the bottom:

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/maven/bin

You can close nano by hitting Ctrl+O followed by enter.

Then, restart your terminal.

Successfully running the above commands should install Maven 3.9.9. To verify that the install was successful, run the following command:

mvn --version

Your output should look something like this:

Apache Maven 3.9.9 
Maven home: /opt/maven
Java version: 21.0.4, vendor: ...
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "linux", version: "5.4.0-72-generic", arch: "amd64", family: "unix"

Install nvm and Node on WSL

The projects in this class currently use Node v20.17.0 (npm v10.8.2)

You can see the various versions of node at this link: https://nodejs.org/en/download/releases. As of F24, the current LTS for node is v20.17.0.

While we could install Node 20.17.0 directly, a better way to install Node on development computers is through Node Version Manager, or nvm. This is a program that allows you to easily install and switch between different versions of Node.

To install nvm, run the following command. As of the time of writing, the latest version is v0.40.1

To check whether this command is the latest version, visit this link

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.40.1/install.sh | bash

If curl is not available on your system, try this command which uses wget instead:

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.40.1/install.sh | bash”

The install script should add the following lines to the end of your ~/.bashrc file (note that Mac users may need to add these to ~/.zshrc instead) . If the following lines are not present, add them:

export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"  # This loads nvm
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion"  # This loads nvm bash_completion

Successfully running the above commands should install nvm v0.40.1 To verify that the install was successful, open a new terminal and run the following command:

nvm -v

Your output should say v0.40.1

Now that we have nvm installed, we can use nvm to install the latest “long term support” version of Node 16 with the following command.

nvm install --lts

Successfully running the above command should install the latest version of node. You can then this command **which you should type in every shell where you are working with the frontend code (i.e. Javascript, React):

nvm use --lts

To verify that the install was successful, run the following command:

node -v

Your output should say v20.17.0 or something similar.

WSL with VS Code

If you are currently a VS Code user (or are considering becoming one), you can install an extension to be able to access, edit, and track files in the WSL from VS Code. The extension is located here. The instructions to use it are located here

Seeing jacoco and pitest output on WSL

On WSL, if you have the output of a jacoco or pitest report, for example in an index.html file in a directory such as target/site/jacoco, here is a way you can get access to that in your web browser.

In File Explorer, enter the path \\WSL$ to access your WSL file system.
Navigate to home\[your-username]\ then navigate to your project directory.
You can simply double-click your HTML files to open them in your browser.

If this doesn’t work, try the following steps:

At a WSL command prompt, cd into the directory with the index.html file, e.g.
```
cd target/site/jacoco
```
If you do an ls in that directory, you should see the index.html file
In that directory, type this command to start up a web server:
```
python3 -m http.server
```
This should start a web server that serves up the files in that directory on an address such as http://0.0.0.0:8000
Try navigating to http://0.0.0.0:8000 in a web browser on the windows side.

If it doesn’t work, then in another WSL window, type ip route

Try substituting the IP address that shows in place of 0.0.0.0, e.g. http://172.29.192.1:8000

There may be more than one IP address shown; try both.