I finally found a solution for installing DevKinsta in Windows 11 using WSL instead of Hyper-V. I couldn’t get Hyper-V to work. It kept giving me the “Something Bad Happened” no matter what I did. I am posting my steps here since I know there are a lot of folks wanting a solution. Results may vary… BTW This is assuming you already setup your machine with WSL-2. I won’t put that info here, since you can find info for that all over this and other sites.
Shutdown and uninstall any version of Docker Desktop and DevKinsta you already have. (If you are running a version that’s 4.29 or lower then you may be ok. After 4.29 Docker Desktop no longer uses the Docker-Desktop-Data distribution path which is required for DevKinsta to work properly. I put the notes from GitHub at the bottom of this post for those interested.
Install Docker Desktop first. This is very important. When installing, choose to use WSL instead of Hyper-V. Once installed, open it so it can create it’s initial Distro.
Once successfully opened and running, Open windows explorer and go to the following folder by pasting this address into the address bar and hitting enter.
Once you are in this folder, create a new folder called DevKinsta
Install DevKinsta and run it. Everything should now load up since it can find the right volume now.
The issue with Versions up to 4.29 were that DevKinsta couldn’t find the DevKinsta volume folder to setup in. The issue with everything 4.30 and above is Docker now uses Docker-Desktop as it’s distro folder instead of Docker-Desktop-Data.
Once I got this working, I was able to import my wordpress staging site with no issues.
Here’s the information and posts I searched through that helped me finally figure this out. Hope this information helps someone!
Notes From Github
Installations of Docker Desktop version 4.30 and later no longer rely on the docker-desktop-data distribution; instead Docker Desktop creates and manages its own virtual hard disk (VHDX) for storage. (note, however, that Docker Desktop keeps using the docker-desktop-data distribution if it was already created by an earlier version of the software).
Thank you so much for sharing your solution in this forum! I tried it, and it worked. We really appreciate your help in providing a workaround for this ongoing issue. You’re awesome!
No problem, glad I could be of some help! As an update I found out that once you have it running in the older version of docker, you can update to the latest version of Docker and it will still work. There are just a couple of things you have to do first. DevKinsta won’t allow you to change the WSL path in the app, but there’s a workaround.
Open DevKinsta and push your latest changes since you will have to cleanup docker to make this work.
Close DevKinsta.
With docker open, update to the latest version. (4.37.1 at the time of this writing)
Open config.json from your devkinsta folder (C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\DevKinsta)
Look for the following code around line 127:
“windowsPath”: “\\wsl.localhost\docker-desktop-data\data\docker\volumes\DevKinsta\”,
“unixPath”: “/mnt/host/wsl/docker-desktop-data/data/docker/volumes/DevKinsta/”
Replace that code with this code:
“windowsPath”: “\\wsl.localhost\docker-desktop\mnt\docker-desktop-disk\data\docker\volumes\DevKinsta\”,
“unixPath”: “/mnt/wsl/docker-desktop/mnt/docker-desktop-disk/data/docker/volumes/DevKinsta/”,
save the config file.
In Docker, select and delete all kinsta containers, images and volumes.
Restart Kinsta and re-import the site.
That should do it! As far as I know this will only work when using my method above on an older version of Docker and then updating and not with a fresh version of docker, since as far as I can tell, the current version of DevKinsta looks for the old docker-desktop-data path when first installing it. When I get a chance I will mess around with doing a brand new install and see if I have any success. In the meantime, hopefully this will help folks who want to run DevKinsta on the latest Docker build.
Hi @russfrancis thank you for dedicating your time and effort to create and share such a detailed workaround. Your contribution is truly appreciated by the entire community, and it’s clear how much thought you put into this. Thank you for going the extra mile!
