Starting Linkerd Dashboard from Windows Subsystem for Linux
Linkerd is the first and probably the most famous service mash framework. It adds transparent proxies to your services in Kubernetes cluster, providing runtime debugging, observability, reliability, and security — all without requiring any changes to your code. You can read more about it on their site or/and listen to Software Engeneering Daily Podcast.
One of it’s strenghs is an ease of use. And installing should not be difficult as well.
So I opened a Getting Started page and got it installed in minutes. However when I tried to open a dashboard, got this error:
Failed to open Linkerd URL http://127.0.0.1:64538/api/v1/namespaces/linkerd/services/linkerd-web:http/proxy/
in the default browser: exec: "xdg-open": executable file not found in $PATH%It turned out that for some reason WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) does not support xdg-open command. So I needed to do “OK, google” to handle that.
Suprisingly, I needed to do several searches, until found something useful. So to save one’s time I decided to write this post.
Idea is to create a script xdg-open that will run cmd.exe. To make it available from anywhere it should be put into PATH. First we check what is in PATH with echo $PATH. I have chosen /usr/local/bin, created a file named xdg-open there and set it’s content to
#! /bin/sh
cmd.exe /c "start $*"Test it with xdg-open https://skalinets.github.io. If you see my blog in new browser window – it’s all good :).
After that linkerd dashboard works like a sharm.
Happy hacking!