Using hail with windows subsystems for linux

Hello all,

My name is Furkan and I would like to thank you first to contributors of this great library.

Can anyone who knows how to use hail in windows with windows subsystems for linux explain the steps we need to follow after downloading it ?

Hi Furkan! I’m sorry to say that Hail isn’t known to work on Windows, even the WSL. There are no concrete plans to make the changes necessary to let Hail run on Windows, though we’d love to support that operating system at some point.

However, hailctl (the tool packaged with the hail library when you pip install hail) should work on Windows, which will let you start hail/spark clusters on Google Cloud and connect to them. If hailctl doesn’t work on WSL, we’ll fix that.

If you absolutely need to run hail locally, then I think a linux VM is your best bet.

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@ozyurtf, regarding a GNU/Linux VM, I recommend investigating Docker for Windows. It makes it easy and quick to run GNU/Linux on Windows. You can use this Dockerfile.

If you’ve never used Docker before, you should check out the Docker orientation and set up.

If you want to use Jupyter Notebooks, you’ll need a Dockerfile for Jupyter Notebooks. Be sure to update the hail version to the latest version!

FROM python:3.6.9-slim-stretch
# re: mkdir, https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=863199#23
RUN mkdir -p /usr/share/man/man1 && \
    apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    openjdk-8-jre-headless \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* && \
    pip3 --no-cache-dir install hail==0.2.41 ipython jupyter
ENTRYPOINT ["jupyter"]
CMD []

Start Jupyter like this via PowerShell:

docker run -p 8888:8888 hail-jupyter notebook --ip=0.0.0.0 --allow-root

You’ll probably want to mount a Windows directory, like your documents folder, into the Docker container. You can learn more about that here.

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