wslmanager

Welcome to WSL Manager 👋

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Shown on <b>Windows</b> &middot; the same app runs native VMs on <b>macOS</b> &mdash; expand <b>See it on macOS</b> below

Preview with light theme (Windows)

🍎 See it on macOS — native Linux and macOS virtual machines through Apple's Virtualization framework (beta)

WSL Distro Manager is a free, open source GUI for the Windows Subsystem for Linux — and, on macOS, for native Linux VMs. Install, copy, rename, move, back up and delete WSL distros without memorising a single wsl.exe flag — plus templates, saved command snippets, disk mounting, .wslconfig editing, remote WSL over SSH, and an MCP server that lets AI agents drive your WSL environment. On a Mac the very same app manages virtual machines through Apple's Virtualization framework instead.

🚀 Features

Manage distros

• Install from a built-in catalogue, or bring your own rootfs
• Copy, rename, move to another drive, back up and delete instances
• Back every instance up to one folder — with a list of what is in it — and restore them all on another PC
• Compact virtual disks to reclaim space WSL never gives back
• Watch what an instance is using right now — processor time, memory and swap, with a live graph
• Supports Ubuntu, Debian, Alpine, Kali Linux, openSUSE, SLES and anything else WSL accepts

Get instances running faster

• Use any Docker image as a distro — Docker itself is not required
• Package a configured distro as a portable .wsl file that installs on any machine (templates are deprecated in favour of these)
• Turnkey Linux and other LXC containers (experimental)
• Snippets: keep your setup commands in the app and run them on any instance
• Point the app at your own repository of rootfs images
• Browse a distro's files and copy the ones you pick into another instance — no share, no mount, no Explorer needed

Configure without editing files by hand

• systemd, automount, default user, start command and start path per distro
• Memory, processors, swap, networking mode, DNS and the rest of .wslconfig
• Mount a physical disk or a VHD into WSL, with partition and filesystem control
• Share host folders into a distro or VM at a mount point you pick, read-only if you like — the AI Workspace included

Work the way you already do

• Open Windows Terminal, VS Code or Explorer straight inside a distro
• Every instance in the Windows Terminal dropdown, kept current while the app runs — contributed as a fragment of its own, so your Terminal settings are never edited
• Manage WSL on a different Windows machine over SSH
• Sync a distro between two machines on your network
• Reach an instance by name: its hostname is kept in your hosts file, so ssh ubuntu.wsl keeps working after a reboot
• Keeps itself up to date: the website and GitHub builds download and install new releases themselves (Store installs are updated by the Store)
• Dark and light themes, available in nine languages

On macOS: native virtual machines (beta)

• The same app manages VMs through Apple's Virtualization framework instead of WSL
• Create Linux VMs from an installer ISO, a cloud image or an exported template
• Create macOS guest VMs from a restore image (Apple Silicon)
• Start, stop, clone, export/import and template VMs like distros
• Run commands inside VMs over auto-provisioned SSH (cloud-init), from the GUI, the AI chat or MCP clients
• A terminal on any VM from its row: an SSH session on a Linux or macOS guest, the serial console where Linux has nothing to SSH to
• Your own ~/.ssh key is authorized in every Linux VM (and created if you have none), so plain ssh user@vm-ip works too
• Every VM gets a login password you can read back from its row, for signing in at the VM's own screen
• Set the account every SSH path signs in as from the same row — a macOS guest's name is typed into Setup Assistant, where the app cannot see it
• Build with scripts/build_macos.sh — bundles the signed vmctl helper

Pro (one-time purchase: a licence key from wslmanager.com/buy, on Windows and macOS alike — never a subscription)

• AI Workspace — run Hermes Agent, OpenClaw, Open WebUI and OpenCode in a dedicated, isolated WSL distro
• One model and endpoint for every AI tool — the assistant's API endpoint, key and model from Settings are what OpenCode, OpenClaw and Hermes use too; set them once, and a tool installed later gets them as well
• AI assistant with tools — the built-in chat can actually operate your WSL: it lists and inspects distros, runs commands, edits config, creates snippets, mounts disks and packages distros through the same tools the MCP server exposes
• Every AI run that changes an instance is saved as a snippet — the commands it ran and what each tool reported, linked from the chat, so you can review it, run it again on a fresh instance or share it
• Sandboxed AI — spin up a throwaway Ubuntu distro and give an AI chat access to only the inside of that sandbox
• Task queue — hand the assistant a checklist and let it work through it, ticking items off as it goes
• MCP server — expose WSL to Claude Desktop, Claude Code, opencode and other MCP clients
• Web dashboard — manage everything from your phone or another computer: scan a QR code, get the whole app in a browser, optionally published beyond your network through a Cloudflare tunnel

The AI features run on credentials you bring — your own OpenAI-compatible API key. No AI service is hosted or included, there is no quota, and no requests pass through anyone else's servers. Pro unlocks the features in the app; it does not buy AI credits. See [Free vs Pro](https://github.com/bostr