Little WSL Things

I recently rebuilt my personal laptop and was trying to remember how I had set up WSL last time so I could develop within WSL again. There were a couple of things I had not done previously, and I was determined to get them working this time around.

Setting up the ASP.NET Developer Certificate

First, I wanted to set up a valid development certificate so that when I run my ASP.NET 6 API, the browser shows it as secure. Before my rebuild, this wasn’t working; the API ran fine, but the browser always showed the site as insecure.

It looks like.NET 6 automatically sets up the ASP.NET developer certificate during installation. When I ran dotnet dev-certs, it said the certificate already existed. Sure enough, when I navigated to /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/aspnet (I’m using Ubuntu on WSL), I could see both https.crt and https.pfx. However, when I launched the API and opened Swagger, the site still showed as unsecured.

What I ended up doing was opening Windows Certificate Manager outside WSL and installing the certificate from there. Open the Start Menu and search for Manage User Certificates. Once it opens, navigate to Trusted Root Certification Authorities / Certificates. Right-click the Certificates node, select All Tasks, then Import.... When prompted for the certificate location, navigate to \\wsl.localhost\Ubuntu\usr\local\share\ca-certificates\aspnet, then import https.crt.

In my case, I had to reboot my computer at that point. I’m not sure whether there’s a way to refresh everything without rebooting, but this worked for me. Launching the API now shows the site as secure.

Ensuring That the Postgres Service is Running on WSL Startup

I didn’t want to manually start Postgres every time I restarted my computer, so I looked for a way to launch it automatically when opening a WSL terminal. That way it would already be running before I typed code.. I found the answer here by Wan Zulkarnain. Full credit to the original author. I’m copying it here for my own reference and in case that site ever goes down.

First, I added this code to my ~/.bashrc file:

if ! pgrep -x "postgres" >/dev/null; then
    sudo pg_ctlcluster 12 main start
    echo "postgres service started using: sudo pg_ctlcluster 12 main start"
fi

I then created a sudoers file called skip_sudo_pg so I didn’t need to enter a password on each WSL startup. In that file, I added the following one-liner:

%sudo   ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/pg_ctlcluster

After stopping WSL and reopening a new terminal window, it successfully started up Postgres for me without me needing to manually do it.

It’s the little things that you come to appreciate… 😉