Exercism Gone But Still There? CLI Installation problems in WSL Windows 10 - Poltergeist?

Exercism Support
1

Hello there!

I would really appreciate the support of someone who knows more about Linux (WSL) than I do.

I have tried and failed to move my Exercism Workouts to my local machine in WSL (Windows 10) several times.

I follow all the instructions on the website to perfect completion and without a glitch.

Then, when I am going to download the exercises, lo and behold, it seems as if exercism has disappeared from the WSL mind, even though it actually exists in the bin directory.

bigspaces@DESKTOP-7PTQE4B:~/bin$ ls
exercism
bigspaces@DESKTOP-7PTQE4B:~/bin$ exercism
internal error, please report: running "exercism" failed: cannot find installed snap "exercism" at revision 5: missing file /snap/exercism/5/meta/snap.yaml

image

Any support will be most appreciated.

2

You sure you installed the correct version?

3

As far as I know I did. 64bits linux system, following the steps of the Exercism guide.

4

Alright I did a quick rundown. I installed exercism on my laptop which runs windows(11) through wsl. It works fine. Are you sure you are using wsl 2? Also which version of windows 10 are you on?

5

To check which version of wsl you are running you can write into the powershell:

wsl -l -v

You should get something like this:

  NAME                   STATE           VERSION
* Ubuntu                 Running         2
  docker-desktop-data    Stopped         2
  docker-desktop         Stopped         2

Without the docker part if you aren’t using docker.

6

This looks like a PATH issue to me.
Can you run ./exercism from the ~/bin directory?

Then can you check whether you got ~/bin in PATH? (run echo $PATH)

7

NAME STATE VERSION
* Ubuntu Running 2

8

Thank you dreig. Did you look at the screenshot provided? It answers your question about running exercism from the bin directory.

9

Notice the dot and slash in front of exercism. Like so: ./exercism
Alternatively run ~/bin/exercism.
If the executable is not in PATH, you can run it by invoking the full path to the executable.

10

The first thing I notice here is the snap reference.

Remove ~/bin/exercism and do an uninstall for the snap installation of exercism.

Install the executable for Ubuntu instead, place it in a directory named ~/bin, ensure it has executable bit set, chmod +x ~/bin/exercism and restart the terminal, and you should be able to execute the exercism without any path reference needed (so no ~/bin/exercism as Ubuntu places this directory in the path if it exists.

Snap has been a problem, and hopefully we will be doing away with those instructions soon, as we are not maintaining this well. (I don’t want to blame Snap, it presumably is a fine system!)

1 Like
11

Hello Kotp

Thank you for your assistance. In the end, fate came to help. I managed to break my machine and now it is in maintenance (BIOS bricked. I conquered the everest of computer breaking abilities!).

So I reinstalled everything in a new machine. I have not yet installed exercism in the new machine, but I will in the next few days. You may hear from me again :slight_smile:

Appreciate your support.

12

Snap is not really supported in wsl. I know it got support in windows 11 for not too long ago (I have not got it to work on my windows 11 machine though) but I am unsure if it actually works on windows 10.

13

Thanks Meatball. The question would then be… what is the proper way to install Exercism in a Windows 10 machine within WSL? Everytime I follow the Exercism guide I end up in that situation :(

14

If you actually want I can jump into a call with you and help you step by step.(later today or whenever), since exercism doesn’t require snap. But snap with wsl isn’t a great combo unless you know exactly what you are doing (which I don’t).

15

I’d download the appropriate binary from the releases at Release exercism-v3.1.0 · exercism/cli · GitHub (you probably want exercism-3.1.0-linux-x86_64.tar.gz) and then put it somewhere on your path.

16

If you use Ubuntu as your WSL flavor, then ~/bin is the preferred path.

Ubuntu will, if and when that path exists, place it in your path automatically. And so having the executable there, with a chmod +x ~/bin/exerism to give it that executable bit, should allow you to execute it in your terminal under a shell such as bash.