Podman Desktop WSL Containers extension

Overview

This repository contains a minimal Podman Desktop extension scaffold for WSL Containers. It is based on extension-template-minimal, at commit f5e0579, with the build, lint, typecheck, and CI changes required for this repository.

The extension entrypoint currently only defines empty activate and deactivate functions. The WSL Containers provider and bridge integration are not implemented yet.

See the Podman Desktop extension documentation for more information about extension development.

Development

Prerequisites: Node.js 24 from .nvmrc and the pinned pnpm version from package.json.

1. Clone the repository and install dependencies:

   git clone https://github.com/podman-desktop/wslc.git
   cd wslc
   nvm use
   corepack enable
   pnpm install --frozen-lockfile

2. Build the extension. Vite writes the Podman Desktop entrypoint to dist/extension.cjs:

   pnpm build

   To rebuild automatically after source changes:

   pnpm watch

3. Run the typecheck, linter, and formatter:

   pnpm typecheck
   pnpm lint:check
   pnpm format:check

   pnpm format:fix rewrites files in place.

4. Load the extension temporarily in Podman Desktop. Clone Podman Desktop, install its dependencies, and run its development build with this repository as the extension folder. For sibling directories:

   cd ../podman-desktop
   pnpm install
   pnpm watch --extension-folder ../wslc

   Run pnpm watch in this repository in a second terminal. Confirm WSL Containers appears in Podman Desktop's Extensions view.

Packaging and publishing

The Containerfile builds the extension from source, so a prebuilt dist/ directory is not required. Build a local OCI image with:

podman build -t localhost/wslc:dev .

For publishing instructions, see the Podman Desktop publishing documentation. The manually dispatched release workflow accepts a semantic version and branch, then publishes the image to ghcr.io/podman-desktop/wslc:<version>. Stable releases also receive the latest tag; prereleases do not.