mikemaccana / compact-wsl2-disk

A small script for Windows 10 Home users to compact their WSL2 disks

WSL2 Compacter 🗜

A small script for Windows 10 Home users to compact their WSL2 disks

Inspired by this post on GitHub about WSL2 filling hard disks. This script will:

• Find your vhdx file(s) in the default paths of
  • WSL2 distros (C:\Users\<NAME>\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited...)
  • Docker WSL2 distros (C:\Users\<NAME>\AppData\Local\Docker)
  • Any other folder defined via the WSL_FOLDERS environment variable. For having multiple directories, format it as $PATH, as in: C:\PATH\TO\FOLDER1;D:\PATH\TO\FOLDER2;...
• Shut down WSL2
• Compact all found disks with diskpart

After that just open another Linux terminal and WSL2 will restart automatically.

Warning

1. I am a strange man on the internet asking you to run a powershell script. You should probably look inside the script compact-wsl2-disk.ps1 and make sure you understand what it does.

2. This will stop WSL. So save your work in Linux.

Usage

Open Powershell as Administrator and run:

powershell.exe .\compact-wsl2-disk.ps1

PRs are welcome!

Please file pull requests instead of just asking for things. Thanks!

License

MIT

Thanks

This person on StackOverflow and everyone on the WSL GitHub and R0Wi.

compact-wsl2-disk's Issues

Add sudo fstrim /

In certain cases, I think, sudo fstrim / is also needed before shutting down wsl microsoft/WSL#4699 (comment)

assumes the current user has admin rights

The script doesn't work if the Admin account is different from the current one because it uses %LOCALAPPDATA%.
This is of course unusual for Home users but if you have an idea how to get the vhdx paths anyway let me know.

Clarify that login for default WSL2 distro may be required

If the default distro is set to one with a password-protected account,

 - Found n VHDX file(s)
 - Shutting down WSL2
[sudo] password for USERNAME:

will show up(n and USERNAME are substitutions for actual values).
It'll be useful to mention this behavior in the Readme.

Side Note: I am not sure if this happens with distros that aren't set as default, but I have no plans to check this behavior in that setting.