Question 39006 in Ubuntu Question posted in
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Can I use zsh as the default non-interactive shell for WSL2 Ubuntu?

I am trying to use Run/Debug Configurations on WebStorm, however it doesn’t seem to source .zshrc and produces errors about not finding commands and environment variables. (An example of this would be yarn tauri dev when using Tauri)

I have installed Ubuntu 20.04 in WSL and the project I opened in WebStorm resides under the $HOME directory. WebStorm is installed in Windows.

For the interactive shell, I have made zsh the default by chsh -s $(which zsh), but when using Run/Debug Configurations it uses the default non-interactive shell, which is dash as far as I know. And my environment variables and PATH are all set in .zshrc, which is not sourced by dash.

It seems in CLion, it is possible to execute commands in the login shell according to this YouTrack issue, but such an option is not available on WebStorm.

Is it possible to use zsh instead of dash as the default non-interactive shell? If not, it would help me a lot to know what is the best practice in such situations.

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  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER
    0

    Thanks to the answer here and the discussion below, I was able to figure it out. (Thank you, @NotTheDr01ds and @lena.)

    The main problem is that WebStorm is installed on Windows and therefore knows only the environment variables in Windows. There are two ways to solve the problem as follows.

    Sharing WSL's environment variable to Windows through WSLENV

    1. Add the line below to .zshrc so that it sets $WSLENV when zsh starts.
    export WSLENV=VAR_I_WANT_TO_SHARE:$WSLENV
# Don't forget to insert the colon
# And for some reason, appending the variable after $WSLENV didn't work well
    1. In Windows, run
    wsl -e zsh -lic powershell.exe

    This runs WSL using zsh (logged-in and interactive), then runs powershell which brings you back to Windows. Although this doesn't seem to achieve anything, by going through zsh in WSL, .zshrc was sourced and therefore $WSLENV set as well. You can check if it worked well by running the below command after you've run the above.

    $env:VAR_I_WANT_TO_SHARE
    1. Run WebStorm from the PowerShell that was just created.
    & 'C:Program Files (x86)JetBrainsWebStorm 2022.1.3binwebstorm64.exe'

    When you run or debug any of the Run/Debug Configurations, you will see that the environment variable is shared successfully.

    Setting the PATH in Windows

    For most environment variables, the previous method works well. However, PATH is an exception. The Windows PATH is shared to WSL by default. The opposite doesn't work, probably because the PATH in WSL should not interfere with Windows.I've tried adding the $PATH of WSL into $WSLENV but it didn't seem to work.

    In the end, what I did was manually adding each needed $PATH of WSL into the Windows PATH.

    For example, if there was export PATH=$PATH:home/(username)/.cargo/bin in .zshrc, you can then add \wsl$Ubuntuhome(username).cargobin to the Windows $env:Path using the Environment Variable window.

    enter image description here

    I might have made some mistakes, so feel free to leave an edit or comments.


  2. 0

    You can try using npm config set script-shell command to set the shell for your scripts. Like npm config set script-shell "/usr/bin/zsh".
    When npm run <script name> spawns a child process, the SHELL being used depends on NPM environment. Cм https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/run-script:

    The actual shell your script is run within is platform dependent. By
    default, on Unix-like systems it is the /bin/sh command, on Windows it
    is the cmd.exe. The actual shell referred to by /bin/sh also depends
    on the system. As of [email protected] you can customize the shell with the
    script-shell configuration

    See also https://github.com/npm/npm-lifecycle/blob/10c0c08fc25fea3c18c7c030d4618a401963355a/index.js#L293-L304

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  3. 0

    There are several questions and points you make:

    First, from the question title (and the summary at the end):

    Can I use zsh as the default non-interactive shell for WSL2 Ubuntu?

    Well, maybe (using symlinks), but it would be a really bad idea. So many built-in scripts rely on /bin/sh pointing to Dash, or at least Bash. While Zsh might be compatible with 99.9% of them, eventually there’s a strong likelihood that some difference in Zsh would cause a system-level script to fail (or at least produce results inconsistent with those from Dash).

    It is possible in Ubuntu to change the default non-interactive ("system" shell) from Dash to Bash with sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash. If you select "No" in the resulting dialog, then the system will be updated to point /bin/sh to bash instead of dash.

    But not to Zsh, no.

    when using Run/Debug Configurations it uses the default non-interactive shell, which is dash as far as I know

    I don’t run WebStorm myself, so I’m not sure on this exactly. Maybe @lena’s answer (or another) will cover it for you, but if it doesn’t, I’m noticing this doc page. It might be worth trying to specify Zsh in those settings, but again, I can’t be sure.

    And my environment variables and PATH are all set in .zshrc, which is not sourced by dash.

    Hmm. I’m guessing you would need these set in a .profile/.zprofile equivalent regardless. I would assume that WebStorm is executing the shell as a non-interactive one, which means that it wouldn’t even parse ~/.bashrc if Bash was your default shell.

    … it would help me a lot to know what is the best practice in such situations.

    Best practice is probably to make sure that your ~/.profile has any environment changes needed. Yes, this violates DRY (don’t repeat yourself), but it’s probably the best route.

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