Configuration Settings for Developing Radius on Windows/WSL

This repo contains dev machine setup resources for developing Radius on Windows 11.

---
title: Radius Development Environment
---
graph
    subgraph A [Windows 11]
        J --> C
        J --> L
        J --> M
        J[Docker Desktop]
        subgraph WSL
            J
            C
            L
            M
            subgraph Ubuntu - git repos
                C((Dev Container - Radius))
                L((Dev Container - Dashboard))
                M((Dev Container - Samples))
            end
        end
    end

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Figure 1: Development Environment architecture showing Windows 11, WSL, and Dev Container relationships. Git repos are cloned to WSL Ubuntu, and dev containers are launched from the git repos.

Contents

• .configurations folder: DSC configurations (that are applied to the machine using winget).
• .devcontainer folder: dev container definitions for testing Radius scenarios
• .github/workflows folder: GitHub Actions workflows for automating Radius development tasks

Prerequisites

Windows 11 with:

• winget version 1.6 or higher
• 32 GB RAM (minimum total machine memory, 64 GB is better)

Installation Step-By-Step

1. Provision a new virtual machine with Windows 11.
2. Open Windows Terminal as administrator and run .\.configurations\Set-WingetConfiguration
3. Reboot (Required for WSL and Docker Desktop)

How to Develop

1. Open a terminal window and launch the Ubuntu WSL distro.
2. Clone the Radius repo to a folder (on Ubuntu). Be sure to include submodules.

git clone https://github.com/radius-project/radius --recurse-submodules`

3. cd to the repo and launch VS Code

cd radius
code .

4. Launch the dev container. VS Code may prompt you to launch the dev container, or open the VS Code command palette and run the command to launch the dev container.

Dev Containers: Rebuild and Reopen in Container

The first dev container build will take some time.

Automated Workflows

This repository includes GitHub Actions workflows that automatically build and publish development containers:

Weekly Radius Dev Container Build

A GitHub workflow (build-radius-devcontainer.yml) runs weekly to:

• Build the latest Radius dev container from the radius-project/radius repository
• Publish the container image to GitHub Container Registry (ghcr.io)
• Make the latest Radius development environment available as a pre-built container

The workflow runs every Sunday at 2 AM UTC and can also be triggered manually. Built containers are available at:

• ghcr.io/[owner]/radius-dev:latest
• ghcr.io/[owner]/radius-dev:[run_number]
• ghcr.io/[owner]/radius-dev:weekly-[run_number]