We first follow a tutorial by Scott Hanselman where we will use Windows’ openSSH to handle ssh connections and set the default ssh shell to be bash on wsl.

Setup ssh on your machine⌗

Choose one of your two machines to be the host. On the host, we need to first check if OpenSSH.Server is installed. Open powershell with elevated rights and run the following

> Get-WindowsCapability -Online | ? Name -like 'OpenSSH*'

Name  : OpenSSH.Client~~~~0.0.1.0
State : Installed

Name  : OpenSSH.Server~~~~0.0.1.0
State : NotPresent

If the state under OpenSSH.server is NotPresent, we need to run

Add-WindowsCapability -Online -Name OpenSSH.Server~~~~0.0.1.0

and start the ssh daemon

Start-Service sshd
Get-Service sshd

If you expect to use the Host more often, you can consider starting the ssh daemon automatically on the host

Set-Service -Name sshd -StartupType 'Automatic'

Next, we will set the default shell used by OpenSSH to be the one used by wsl

New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\OpenSSH" -Name DefaultShell -Value "C:\WINDOWS\System32\bash.exe" -PropertyType String -Force

Make your machine discoverable over network⌗

To be able to find your host machine that runs the ssh daemon, you need to make some configurations in the network settings first. On both machines, go to network settings and under “network profile”, select “private network”. This will allow both machines to be discoverable on the WiFi network. If all is well, when you open File Explorer, under Network you should see your two machines. If you don’t see it, you might need to restart your computer(s), or temporary turn off Windows firewall.

Preparing to copy⌗

Now that this is all set-up, you should be able to ssh into your host computer via

ssh user@host

where user is your Windows login username (not your wsl linux username), and host is your host computer’s local private ip address that looks like 192.168.x.x or 172.x.x.x. You can get the ip address by either running ifconfig eth0 in your terminal, or by opening your Windows Network Settings (win-key > “network settings”).

If you do not manage to connect, make sure the ssh daemon is running on your host computer by running sudo service ssh status. If it is not running you can start it with sudo service ssh start. If you still cannot connect, try to open port 22 in your firewall on the host computer, or temporary turn off Windows firewall.

If all is correct you should get inside your host’s wsl partition directly.