WSLC Desktop

A Desktop Windows GUI for WSLC (WSL Containers).

It aims to be fast and resource efficient; it's one self-contained WslcDesktop.exe of about 10 MB with memory usage around 90 MB. It does not need the .NET runtime; it's built with MewUI and published with NativeAOT.

Features

• Containers:
  • A list with status, CPU, memory, ports and age, plus search.
  • Start, stop, restart, kill and remove, including bulk actions on a multi-selection; removing all stopped containers.
  • A Run dialog for image, name, command, ports, environment, volumes and auto-remove, with the equivalent wslc command.
  • Container details:
    • Logs: follows live; filter, timestamps, pause, copy.
    • Stats: CPU, memory, network and disk charts.
    • Files: browse, preview, download, upload (drag and drop from Explorer works). Stopped containers are shown as a read-only snapshot.
    • Inspect.
    • Exec: one-off commands.
    • Open terminal: wslc exec -it in Windows Terminal.
• Images:
  • Pull, build from a Dockerfile (live output, build arguments) and run.
  • Remove and clean up.
  • Save to, load from and import a tar file; push; registry sign-in. The password goes to wslc on stdin, never on the command line.
• Volumes: list with "used by", create, remove, clean up, inspect.
• Networks: list, create, remove, clean up, inspect.
• Troubleshoot: engine details, a log of every wslc command the app ran (with timings and errors), copy diagnostics, open the WSLC settings file, restart the engine.
• Settings: light, dark or system theme; keep running in the notification area when the window is closed.
• Tray icon: a menu showing what's running, and Quit.

The app never keeps the WSLC VM awake:

• Background polling slows to every 45 s when nothing is running, and stops while the VM is idle.
• Event and stats streams run only while containers are running.

Development Requirements

• Windows 11 with WSL 3.0+ (wslc.exe in C:\Program Files\WSL)
• .NET SDK 10.0.4xx (pinned in global.json)
• To publish with NativeAOT: the Visual Studio C++ build tools (the "Desktop development with C++" workload)

Build, test, run

dotnet test --solution WslcDesktop.slnx
dotnet run --project src/WslcDesktop.App
./build/publish.ps1                 # NativeAOT → artifacts/publish/win-x64/WslcDesktop.exe

A banned-API analyzer (BannedSymbols.txt) turns any use of System.Diagnostics.Process outside WslcDesktop.Engine.Cli into a build error. In the future we may investigate using COM calls instead of invoking wslc.exe to avoid the overhead of starting a new process; but the COM API is not a stable API. Restricting the use of Process to a single project makes it easier to switch to COM later.