You can install and run the (x86_64) linux version of the Seafile server on the Windows Subsystem for Linux without any major issues following the instructions on the manual, only use this for testing purposes.
I thought I post my discovery here to raise awareness on this possibility, given that I couldn’t find any discussion about it.
What Linux/Unix version does Windows allow to use for this?
Is this a fully working Linux running via Hyper-V code?
No, the Windows Subsystem for Linux emulates a linux kernel with windows components. It, amongst many other things, provides an interface that translates Linux syscalls to Windows syscalls. No virtual machines involved. You can see me opening notepad.exe (a windows executable) from the shell running on a linux environment.
It’s running as Ubuntu 16, I followed the instructions on the manual for that version of Ubuntu.
You can learn more about it reading the article I linked on the first post. It’s interesting stuff.
Microsoft officially released the subsystem as stable right? So why not use it for production if people need to stick with Windows?
It requires WS2016/W10, setup of the subsystem, deployment of Seafile and that’s it.
This is way better than the official docker image that is provided I think.
Yes it is quite stable (and marked as out of beta), however the WSL team clearly states that the WSL is intended to be used as a “developer tool”, so we have to keep in mind that the meaning of the “stable” label is not the same when it is being applied to development tools than to production tools. WSL brings a lot of new things into the table in terms of innovation and usability, AND possible bugs and/or security vulnerabilities. We don’t know yet as it is too early to tell.
It would be interesting to know what @daniel.pan and the sf team have to say about this new way of running seafile on Windows, given the issues that have been brought up lately about the Windows version.
I think that this should be a fully viable option once WSL 2 is released.