Ability to build/install WSL distros from containerfiles directly

[akgvn]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
We're using WSL as the main way to use Codex / coding agents in our team these days. One annoying thing is having to setup everyone's machines one by one. We're having to install the distribution, then run some scripts to make sure the environment is set up correctly, etc.

Describe the solution you'd like
Ideal solution would be to be able to just do wsl --install-from-containerfile <path-to-containerfile> (and maybe some parameters for the containerfile such as username/password to be used).

Describe alternatives you've considered
The alternative solution is to script docker/podman export and then do wsl --import the resulting tar file (docs). There's also the option to build a .wsl file (docs).

Additional context
It looks like the pieces are there, we just need to be able to essentially say wsl --install-from-containerfile with a containerfile that's committed to a git repository and have everything set up for everyone instead of having to either copy tar files around or distributing run-this-only-once.sh scripts.

It's fine if this functionality requires podman or docker to also be installed, as long as it's not forcing people to use any other CLI tool other than wsl itself.

[github-actions]

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[akgvn]

/feature

[github-actions]

Diagnostic information

Found '/feature', adding tag 'feature'

[kotenok2000]

Why not run something like curl.exe https://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/amd64/autobuilds/current-stage4-amd64-wsl-systemd/stage4-amd64-wsl-systemd-20260503T164604Z.wsl | wsl --install --from-file - --location e:\wsl\gentoo --name gentoo

[chemwolf6922]

Hi @akgvn , For your use case, it might be better to setup a pipeline in your repo that builds the .wsl file. And have a simple script that downloads and installs the .wsl file as suggested above.
Please note that an OCI / docker container's content may not be the best fit as a wsl distro. Please refer to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/build-custom-distro for details.