WSL2 Increase the maximum amount of inotify user watches

[Comevius]

Please consider increasing the maximum amount of inotify user watches (fs.inotify.max_user_watches) in WSL2.
The current limit (8192) is too low for most projects.

For a seamless Visual Studio Code Remote Development experience a new limit of 524288 is suggested. That would allow to watch up to 524288 files, using up to 540 MiB kernel memory.

Alternatively make fs.inotify.max_user_watches configurable, which would probably require the init system of WSL2 to read configuration files placed in /etc/sysctl.d/. See #4232.

The current workaround is:

• Create a script:

#!/bin/sh
sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288
sysctl -p

• Run sudo chown root:root and sudo chmod 755 on the script
• Either move the script to a directory owned by root or run sudo chattr +i on it, otherwise it can be deleted
• Run sudo EDITOR=nano visudo and add this:
  %sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD:/path/to/script.sh
• Add this to .profile:
  sudo /path/to/script.sh
• Don't forget to remove the line above from visudo if you delete /path/to/script.sh

[therealkenc]

#4232

[marcinolek]

@Comevius thank you, thank you, thank you! This is really a brilliant workaround, and actually the only one that works. I spent several hours trying to make it work and the most of 'google' solutions claimed that:
sudo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 && sudo sysctl -p should've been enough to make it pernament. It is not the case for WSL. Now everything works smoothely.

This really needs to be documented (at least) or implemented in WSL2.

[jiangbo0216]

I use sudo passwd root to enable root user ,
then cd /root
then I create a init.sh file in /root
then I sudo chown root:root init.sh and sudo chmod 755
then vim /etc/sudoers
add %sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD:/root/init.sh
then vim .profile
add sudo /root/init.sh

the result : fail
#4232
please help!!

[gorbunovav]

@jiangbo0216 it works for me.

You don't need to enable password for root, just use
sudo su -

You can't use vim directly to edit /etc/sudoers, you should use visudo (pay attention to the original instructions).

There is already a line in /etc/sudoers for the %sudo group, the order of records is important, so you should put the additional record after the existing one:

%sudo   ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
%sudo   ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD:/root/init.sh

You need to exit the editor the changes to take effect.

To check, that everything works just open another bash shell and try to execute:
sudo /root/init.sh
it should not ask for a password.

After placing script call into the .profile there should be init.sh output visible during the shell start.

[alan23273850]

https://auo.nu/posts/wsl2-livereload/

This blog post says that WSL2 only watches file in the WSL-related folders. So I move my original one from Windows-related to WSL-related and it works! Many thanks to this blog.