Alpine Linux for WSL¶

Alpine Linux for WSL - a project provides a ready-to-use Alpine Linux distribution for the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Features¶

• Based on the official Alpine Linux mini root filesystem.
• Designed for WSL 2.
• OpenRC init system with automatic startup.
• cloud-init configured with the WSL data source.
• System logging (dmesg, OpenRC, syslog) with log rotation.
• Built-in task scheduler (cron).

Requirements¶

• Windows 10 version 1903 or newer, or Windows 11
• Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2).

Installation options¶

Manual installation¶

Download the distribution for your architecture and install it by double-clicking the file.

Manual installation with commands¶

Download the image for your architecture and install it with:

wsl --install --from-file C:\Users\<UserName>\Download\alpine-3.23.3-1-x86_64.wsl

Using an additional WSL distributions list¶

You can also install Alpine from an unofficial community list of additional WSL distributions.

To register the list, run the following commands as Administrator.

Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss" `
  -Name DistributionListUrlAppend `
  -Value "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/greengorych/wsl-configs/main/distributions/distributions.json" `
  -Type String -Force

reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss" ^
/v "DistributionListUrlAppend" ^
/t REG_MULTI_SZ ^
/d "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/greengorych/wsl-configs/main/distributions/distributions.json" ^
/f

After adding the list, view available distributions:

wsl --list --online

If Alpine appears in the list, install it with:

wsl --install Alpine