Installation

Requirements

• Windows 10/11 with WSL2 (wsl --install)
• A Windows Docker CLI, e.g. scoop install docker docker-compose
• dockup.exe on your PATH (Windows amd64 or arm64)

Getting dockup.exe

Build from source (Go 1.24+):

git clone https://github.com/CHE3MZ/dockup.git
cd dockup
go build -o dockup.exe ./cmd/dockup

Running setup

dockup setup

By default, setup asks two things: where to install the distro (any absolute path, e.g. D:/WSL — empty input keeps the shown default, which is whatever you used last; --path skips this), and confirms before touching anything:

Setting up dockup :
    dockup will install and configure a new instance on WSL under the name "dockup"
    proceed ? [y/n]

It then downloads Debian, imports it as the dockup distro, installs Docker from Docker's official apt repo, enables systemd + the engine services, and verifies each stage (test results : success). If a stage fails you get something went wrong , retry or abort ? [retry/abort].

Finishing prints:

you're all good to go ! run "dockup" to start a foreground process or "dockup daemon start" to start a background daemon process.

Useful flags

Flag	Effect
--amd / --arm	Distro architecture (default --amd)
--path=DIR	Install here without asking (becomes the new default on success)
--dry-run	Print distro name, install dir, URLs + sizes, pipe/TCP plan — changes nothing

Reinstalling

If a dockup distro already exists, setup asks:

Warning : An installation of dockup already exists on WSL, do you wish to delete that installation and let dockup re-install a new dockup instance on WSL ? [y/n]

Answering n aborts cleanly with exit code 0 and changes nothing.

Verify it works

dockup daemon start
docker -H npipe:////./pipe/dockup_engine run --rm hello-world