Check if SigNoz works for Windows Subsytem for Linux and report findings

[pranay01]

Some users want to use SigNoz for WSL

We don't have official support for it as of now, but would be great for somebody to test this and report findings.

[chickoocoutinho]

When running in WSL, hot reloading for the frontend doesn't work when the files are in the Windows file system. You have to place the files in Linux file system for hot reloading to work.

(WSL) Issue Details

microsoft/WSL#6255
microsoft/WSL#4739

[pranay01]

I see. Thanks for reporting @chickoocoutinho
We will keep this issue open for now to see if there are many users trying to run SigNoz in WSL. If you are one such user, please comment here as +1

[xpherism]

One thing you could mention in the README, is that for WSL users the containers directory need to be mounted like this

- /mnt/wsl/docker-desktop-data/version-pack-data/community/docker/containers:/var/lib/docker/containers:ro

for the OTEL collector. Assuming you are using docker desktop :-)

[Qpirate]

I have just done an install using the install.sh script rather than calling the docker-compose scripts as has been given before.

there was one change i needed to make in the install.sh script which was to detect if the distro is running on Microsoft.

The exact change in needed to make was on the start_docker() method

start_docker() {
    echo -e "🐳 Starting Docker ...\n"
    if [[ $os == "Mac" ]]; then
        open --background -a Docker && while ! docker system info > /dev/null 2>&1; do sleep 1; done
    # elif added
    elif grep -qi microsoft /proc/version; then
    echo "WSL Detected"
    else 
        if ! $sudo_cmd systemctl is-active docker.service > /dev/null; then
            echo "Starting docker service"
            $sudo_cmd systemctl start docker.service
        fi
        if [[ -z $sudo_cmd ]]; then
            if ! docker ps > /dev/null && true; then
                request_sudo
            fi
        fi
    fi
}

I also was not able to use a /mnt/c location but apart from that it was seamless