How can I set environment variables for WSL2 instances from the Wezterm config?

[nikfp]

What Operating System(s) are you running on?

Windows, macOS

Which Wayland compositor or X11 Window manager(s) are you using?

N/A

WezTerm version

wezterm 20230712-072601-f4abf8fd

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When I run Wezterm in MacOS, I'm able to set environment variables through config.set_environment_variables and it works great. I'm able to tie my theme in the terminal, Tmux, and Vim in with the OS setting very easily.

I also work on a windows machine a lot and I use Wezterm there too, and do my dev work in WSL2. I'd like to get the same functionality with the windows/WSL setup as I have on the Mac, but setting env vars the same way isn't working. I assume I need to do something during startup of the WSL shell to pass that variable in but it's not clear in what I can find in the docs.

If anyone has any insight please let me know.

Edit: I should also mention that Wezterm is great. Configuration has been a snap other than this one hangup. Thanks for the awesome tool!

[wez]

how are you using WSL with wezterm? WslDomains? Manually running wsl.exe? Something else?

[nikfp]

I'm doing this in the config currently. Note that setting the env variable is in a conditional and I have another branch for light as well.

config.set_environment_variables = {
    OS_THEME = "Dark"
 }

config.default_domain = "WSL:Ubuntu-20.04"
config.default_prog = { "wsl" }
config.default_cwd = "~"

This is straight from the docs for setting the var and starting into the WSL instance.

Glad to provide any other context you need as well.

[yerlaser]

Have you found a solution?
Doesn't work for me either :(

[kuro337]

Facing the same issue - having a hard time trying to figure out if this is possible or if it's not possible - have scoured all of the docs and settings.

For example - I need a way to determine on my remote if it was launched by WezTerm or not - would appreciate any feedback @wez

[drop-stones]

The documentation states that set_environment_variables support only "local" domain.
Therefore, I think we cannot set environment variables in WslDomain using set_environment_variables now.

On the other hand, WSL has a WSLENV environment variable to share environment variables with Windows (See https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/share-environment-vars-between-wsl-and-windows/#what-are-environment-variables).
To set environment variables on WSL using WSLENV, I tried the following configuration:

{
  label = "WSL2",
  args = { "wsl" },
  domain = {
    DomainName = "local",
  },
  set_environment_variables = {
    FOO = "bar",
    WSLENV = "FOO",
  }
}

I expected the FOO environment variable to be set on WSL.
However, the user defined WSLENV was not reflected because wezterm overrides the WSLENV environment variable automatically.
This behavior is described here.

It would be great if set_environment_variables could be used to set WSL environment variables.