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I am running a local AEM server in my Windows machine. The server is running on localhost:4502. I am using Ubuntu distro running in WSL2 for my development. I want to access the localhost:4502 running in the Windows machine in my WSL2 Ubuntu.

Is there any way to do that or is it not possible ?

Ganesh A.S
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    Your Windows's machine IP plus the 4502 should be enough, though you would like to check that the firewall is allowing the connection, – ronnyfm Nov 10 '20 at 12:12
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    No this is completely wrong!, I have this problem too and your answer is wrong unfortunately. I try ssh -p and the connection is immediately and always refused ! any other ideas? – SheppLogan Jul 14 '21 at 15:31

7 Answers7

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Short answer for most recent Windows versions

mDNS has been a feature of WSL2 for a while now. Concatenating your WSL2 hostname (or the equivalent command/function in your programming/language environment) with ".local" should get you access.

For example, from Bash, try:

ping "$(hostname).local"

For instance, if your hostname is "MyComputer", then the mDNS should be MyComputer.local.

If ICMP is blocked (as it seems to be on new Windows 11 installs), or if you want to test the connection to the actual port, then use netcat. It's available by default in the WSL Ubuntu installation, but may need to be installed in other distributions like openSUSE:

nc -zv "$(hostname).local" <portnumber>

Why localhost doesn't work

WSL2 is running with a virtual network (vNIC) that is created by the Windows Virtual Machine Platform (a subset of Hyper-V). Inside WSL2, localhost is the address of the vNIC.

What you need

WSL2 also sets up a virtual router on the Windows host to allow connectivity to both the outside world as well as the Windows host. You can see this via:

ip route

This is the address you need to use for the Windows host.

You could, of course, parse it from the route (or, as in an earlier answer, from /etc/resolv.conf), but WSL sets up a convenience mDNS (the .local domain) using the Windows "computer name", which is also used as the hostname of the WSL instance.

So concatenating $(hostname) (or it's equivalent in your programming/language environment) with ".local" should get you access.

Remember to have your Windows service accept connections from remote hosts

Many servers are configured by default to bind to localhost/127.0.0.1. Because WSL2 appears to Windows as a remote network, you'll typically need to update your configuration to bind to 0.0.0.0 or a specific address.

Note that, since the address for WSL2 changes after each reboot, it can be difficult to update your configuration each time. If at all possible, use 0.0.0.0 unless there are security concerns. Since WSL is designed for development rather than production, this shouldn't be an issue.

NotTheDr01ds
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  • Excellent! Why isn't this marked as the answer? You can wrap this idea with a convenient script which you call, instead of curl directly. – automorphic Apr 15 '22 at 22:41
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I was also looking for some solution to do this but currently, there is no such option available. Check out this GitHub issue:

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4619

One solution can be this:

If you have the IP of windows(host) then it will do the job but the only problem is that IP will change every time. But, WSL2 stores your windows(host) IP in /etc/resolv.conf file. So we can modify our etc/hosts to map winhost to the IP dynamically.

Add the following lines at the end of ~/.bashrc file. This will grep the IP and modify the etc/hosts when you boot the WSL.

export winhost=$(cat /etc/resolv.conf | grep nameserver | awk '{ print $2 }')
if [ ! -n "$(grep -P "[[:space:]]winhost" /etc/hosts)" ]; then
        printf "%s\t%s\n" "$winhost" "winhost" | sudo tee -a "/etc/hosts"
fi

then run the following command to reload the changes.

$ source ~/.bashrc

now you can use winhost instead of localhost in WSL2(client) to access the servers running windows(host). In your case, it will be winhost:4502 but this will work for any other use cases as well like accessing Postgres/MySQL server running on windows, etc.

NOTE: Always remember to configure your firewall on windows to allow those ports so that WSL2 can access otherwise your connection may get blocked by firewall.

Tarun Kumar
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    Hello, I have this problem too and your answer is wrong unfortunately. I try ssh -p and the connection is immediately and always refused ! Any other ideas? – SheppLogan Jul 14 '21 at 15:30
  • @SheppLogan I am not sure what you are trying to achive. Can you elaborate more? – Tarun Kumar Jul 15 '21 at 10:32
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    This is the accepted answer but it implies that the service is not listening on localhost, but on 0.0.0.0 with a firewall... – Andrea Ratto Sep 23 '21 at 12:34
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You need add ipv6 rule in hosts file.

Like:

127.0.0.1 example.com
::1 example.com localhost

I had a similar problem and found the solution at this link: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5728

Nailan Barbosa
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This really belongs on another forum, but I suspect you could do this.

  1. Step 1. Run your AEM server on your actual IP address (or all addresses) instead of binding to just localhost.

  2. Step 2. Your Ubuntu WSL client instance won't share localhost with the host machine, but it will share the local IP address your machine actually has (e.g. 10.0.0.2). Just have your client connect to that IP address instead of localhost.

  3. I don't know anything about AEM, but you might need to secure it if you are exposing it to a larger network. Block port 4502 on the upstream firewall or use a Windows Firewall rule to only allow incoming on port 4502 from your own IP address. This certainly appears possible.

selbie
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Windows 10 considers localhost as ::1 Ubuntu considers localhost as 127.0.0.1

So solution is to create a mapping

create a file called .wslconfig in C:\Users<your_username>.wslconfig

add the following to it.

[wsl2]
localhostForwarding=true

PS: I dont know if it mess up anything else but it helped me run django servers which were broken after upgrading to wsl2

Vipin Mohan
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    `localhostForwarding` should already [default to `true`](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config#wsl-2-settings) on WSL2, but sometimes it seems to break down, and I haven't been able to identify a cause. Usually just doing a `wsl --shutdown` and restarting the session will restore it for most people. – NotTheDr01ds Jan 27 '21 at 00:56
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    This answer really needs at least one correction. ::1 vs 127.0.0.1 has absolutely nothing to do with Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu. Windows 10 understands 127.0.0.1 just fine, and Ubuntu understands ::1 just fine, too. The real difference is that ::1 is the IPv6 address, and 127.0.0.1 (or any IP address starting with 127, really) is IPv4. – Kevin Keane Apr 24 '21 at 20:05
  • so please do explain exactly why this fixed my issue? because as far i'm concerned it fixed the issue. and apparently for the users as well. – Vipin Mohan Apr 26 '21 at 06:44
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    From microsoft doc, `localhostForwarding` means "ports bound to localhost in the WSL 2 VM should be connectable from the host" but **not** "ports bound to localhost in the host should be connectable from the WSL 2 VM", so this answer won't work. – ayanamist Jun 22 '21 at 03:40
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This is simple, you just need to do 2 things. set ip address to localhost in hosts file and allow windows firewall to allow incoming connections. Here are steps by step instructions:

  1. Get IP address, open cmd type ipconfig /all, note down ip address 172.22.16.1 image
  2. Open notepad as administrator, File->open , browse to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts , add line 172.22.16.1 localhost, save and close.
  3. Last option is to allow Firewall rules to accept public connections, for this open control panel > System and Security > Windows Defender Firewall > Advanced Settings > Inbound Rules > 'New Rule`
  4. Rule Type : choose Port , click next
  5. Protocol and Ports : type *Specific local port: 4502 , click next
  6. Action : Allow the connection , click next
  7. Profile : check Public , click next
  8. Name : type AEM server , click finish
  9. close other windows, again open cmd , type wsl --shutdown for shutdown ubuntu subsystem.
  10. open ubuntu again.
  11. testing connection type curl localhost:4502 in command prompt. if it returns something means you are good to go.
sorabh86
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The easy way:

in ubuntu command line type: ip route 

default via 172.23.96.1 dev eth0
172.23.96.0/20 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 172.23.97.122

In your app, config the host to: 172.23.97.122

Now you can access using Windows Browser

OneCricketeer
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Daniel Soares Martins
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    Hello and Welcome to Stack Overflow. Just a heads-up that I already covered the `ip route` command as an option to get the IP address in my existing answer. Duplicate answers should be avoided, so please make sure to read the existing answers before writing a new one. Also note that this IP address changes each time you restart WSL (or your computer), so it's not "the easy way", unfortunately. As I mentioned in my answer, it's best to use the mDNS name, since that will always resolve to the correct address (as long as mDNS is enabled). – NotTheDr01ds Nov 22 '21 at 19:59