Installing Node.js in the Windows Linux Subsystem (WLS) is quick and easy – accomplished by essentially running 2 commands. By reading the official Node.js docs, we can see that Ubuntu installs are provided via NodeSource. Once at NodeSource, we see the commands required for Debian based Linux systems, such as Ubuntu (as of the time of this writing, I am running the Ubuntu 18.04.01 LTS subsystem).

First, we need to pull down the installer script and execute it using a 1-liner:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_11.x | sudo -E bash -

A bit about the command that we just ran. As you’re likely already aware, curl is a command line utility for interfacing with various protocols – in this case, http(s). If so inclined, you can take a look at the contents of the “setup_11.x” bash script. So, as you know, we’re working with a bash script – which we’re pulling down with the assistance of curl, but rather than saving it to our local filesystem, we’re piping it’s contents to bash, which we’re elevating using sudo. As you may have noticed, we’re actually calling “sudo -E”, which instructs sudo to preserve environmental variables while executing. So we call “bash -” as administrator, that training dash instructing bash “take the input from the pipe and treat the contents of a bash script”. By inspecting the output, or better yet from reading the bash script, we can see that we’re essentially modifying our apt sources to allow us to ‘apt install’ Node.js using the NodeSource repo. Easy peasy.

sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

With our apt sources updated to include the NodeSource repo, we use “apt-get install” to install nodejs – just as we would any apt package. Just as is the case with other apt installed packages, apt will evaluate all required dependencies for Node.js and install them on your system as needed before installing the Node.js binary.

Once installation has completed, you should be able to execute “node -v” and “npm -v” to see your installed versions.

We now have a fully functional Node.js environment in our Windows Linux Subsystem!