How to mount a WSL2 folder as a Network Drive in Windows 10+?

Question

I have created a shared folder in my WSL2 instance (Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS) which seems to be accessible and working. I created the folder in the /mnt/wsl location. After that, I can access the new folder in Windows File Explorer using \\wsl$\.

Everything seems to be perfect. However, my main challenge is that I must access the folder ae-games from a .NET App. We are trying to mount it as a Network Drive, but when we try it says the path doesn't exist:

We are trying to mount the drive because the folder contains thousands of files that we are analyzing coming from an EFS Shared Drive in AWS.

Our current workaround is copying the files from EFS to Windows every couple of hours. However, this is problematic because the shared drive is massive, and S3 is not an option because of ECS and Fargate limitations.

Does anyone know if this is a WSL2 limitation that we can't mount as a Network Drive? Or can someone guide me and tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

You can use subst command to do that: subst z: \\wsl.localhost\Ubuntu\home\user .

Answer 2

I found that for now, the only way to do it is mounting the "Root" folder: \\wsl$\Ubuntu:

Now, I can access it as Z:\mnt\wsl\efs\ae-games

It's important to highlight that this will fail if you want to mount only one specific folder. Most likely, it was designed like this from the very beginning.

I found the solution here:

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/3854#issuecomment-631356968

Note:

I wrote this tutorial with all the steps if it's useful for anyone.