How to SSH into WSL 2

Section: Setting up the environment

This guide is explicitly for the second version of WSL. All the following actions should be performed inside a WSL environment until told otherwise.

First, make sure you have the ssh package installed.

Then visit the configuration file of your SSH server:

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

There are two things you'll need to change here. First, the port the SSH server will use. That's because the default port used is 22, which is the same the host system uses for its SSH. You can change it for something else, 2222, for example. Create or alter the line with the following content:

Port 2222

Second, you'll need to enable authentication. For that, you may use passwords or keys. Enable the preferred way (or both) by creating or altering the lines with the following contents:

PasswordAuthentication yes
PubkeyAuthentication yes

Save the file and restart the SSH server:

sudo service ssh --full-restart

Now you should be able to SSH into your WSL environment from the host system. Note, though, that you'll need to use your local IP for that, and not localhost or 127.0.0.1. To get it, you should run ifconfig inside a WSL environment you want to connect to and copy the IP address from the inet line in the eth0 section. After that, running the following on the host system:

ssh user@ip -p 2222

should give a prompt to your shell. Note that this IP will change after restarting the WSL environment.