With the release of the Windows 10 Insider build 18945, the Windows Subsystem for Linux version 2 now supports the ability for Windows 10 applications to connect to WSL2 apps via localhost.

When WSL2 was first released, it no longer had the ability to connect to a WSL2 Linux server from Windows 10 applications using the localhost address.

If you wanted to connect to a WSL2 app from your Windows applications, you would now have to look up the IP address assigned to the running Linux distribution and connect to that instead.

Windows 10 Insider build 18945 has now added the localhost feature to WSL2 and you can connect to your locally running Docker, NPM, or other services via Localhost. This is illustrated using the nc command in the image below.

With this feature added, users can now enjoy the benefits of the increased WSL2 performance while still being able to easily access any linux servers that they are running.

Bind servers to 0.0.0.0 for localhost to work

Some users have had issues getting the localhost feature to work in WSL2 because their servers are bound to 127.0.0.1.

WSL program manager Craig Loewen has stated in a WSL2 bug post that in order for the localhost to work, server need to be accessible to all IP address and thus bound to 0.0.0.0.

For example, the user reported that they were unable to get PHP working on localhost with the php -S localhost:8000 command.

This is because the HOSTS file maps localhost to the specific 127.0.0.1 loopback address and thus the feature didn’t work.

When the user bound PHP to 0.0.0.0, using the php -S 0.0.0.0:8000 command, the localhost connection feature worked.

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