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!