Drupal 10 Development in Windows with WSL2

For many, like myself, Windows is the preferred environment for development. Software like Drupal, however, is much more easily managed in a Linux environment. Fortunately, there’s a solution.

Windows Setup This Setup applies to Windows 10

Install WSL 2

wsl --install

Install Ubuntu 22.04.6 from the Microsoft Store

It should prompt you for a username/password, and you’re ready to go. I picked the username ‘drupaldev’ which will be reused through this post, but you can use whatever you like (just remember to user your username anywhere that drupaldev is referenced later on)

Handling Apex(root) Domains for Azure Front Door

Azure Front Door is a great product, but one limitation that exists is the inability to handle apex domains that are not handled through Azure DNS. This leaves two options:

Move your DNS to Azure or Host your site on a subdomain, such as www If you choose option 2, I’m sure you will still want your apex domain to redirect to the subdomain, however. Azure Web Apps do not have the same limitation. You can create a small application which runs in an Azure Web App that performs this redirection. Fortunately, this is an incredibly simple application to write with .NET Core.

Working in the Office… from Home

There has been a lot of discussion the last few years about remote work. Is it good? Is it bad? How do you manage people and develop camaraderie with people that you never see? At our organization, we have developed a different approach than what is typically seen, and it really works for us.

Prior to COVID, we had circumstances that required one of the employees in our department to work from home for a period of time. Higher Ed in general is notoriously reluctant to embrace remote work, but approval was given. We had a spare TV hanging on the wall in our office which we used for meetings between campuses and testing out new AV equipment. We had the idea to put that remote employee up on the wall and join them to a persistent video call throughout the day.