Windows Codex cannot start when WSL mode is enabled (terminalShell=wsl)

[askxue]

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

26.309.3504.0

What subscription do you have?

plus

What platform is your computer?

Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.26200.0 x64

What issue are you seeing?

Codex fails to start when the following configuration exists in: C:\Users<user>.codex\codex-global-state.json

"runCodexInWindowsSubsystemForLinux": true,
"integratedTerminalShell": "wsl"

When these options are enabled, Codex desktop cannot start successfully.

The application crashes during initialization.

Manually editing the configuration file resolves the issue.

File: C:\Users<user>.codex\codex-global-state.json

"runCodexInWindowsSubsystemForLinux": false,
"integratedTerminalShell": "powershell"

After this change, Codex starts normally.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

1. Install Windows Codex
2. Open Settings
3. Change the Agent environment to WSL
4. Change the Integrated terminal shell to WSL
5. Restart

You can see the Codex crashed!

What is the expected behavior?

Works well with WSL on Windows

Additional information

Happy to help test fixes if needed.

[github-actions]

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

• Codex App (WSL mode on arm64 cpu not working) #13565
• WSL startup failure when /mnt/c automount disabled #13588
• Codex app-server exited unexpectedly #13658
• Codex Windows crashed with WSL - WSL config location #13699
• After using wsl mode codexapp doesn't load the window correctly #13693

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[wbdb]

The error suggests that /usr/bin/bash is missing in your current environment. You can easily verify if it exists by running ls -l /usr/bin/bash or which bash inside your WSL terminal. Are you currently using Ubuntu as your default WSL distribution, or a minimal one like Alpine?

[askxue]

The error suggests that /usr/bin/bash is missing in your current environment. You can easily verify if it exists by running ls -l /usr/bin/bash or which bash inside your WSL terminal. Are you currently using Ubuntu as your default WSL distribution, or a minimal one like Alpine?

Thanks for the reply.

My WSL environment itself is working normally. Before Codex for Windows was released, WSL was actually my main development environment, and I used Codex CLI there regularly without any issues.

The problem only appears with the Codex Windows desktop app when both of these settings are enabled:

runCodexInWindowsSubsystemForLinux = true
integratedTerminalShell = "wsl"

My normal WSL development workflow (Node, pnpm, etc.) works fine outside of Codex.

[ralphtrickey]

I had that problem and found out my default wsl was docker desktop. I changed it to Ubuntu and was able to run Codex.

[askxue]

I had that problem and found out my default wsl was docker desktop. I changed it to Ubuntu and was able to run Codex.

Thanks for the suggestion — that was exactly the issue.

My default WSL distro was docker-desktop. After switching the default distro to my actual development environment (aimuo, which is Ubuntu), Codex now starts correctly with WSL mode enabled.

So it seems Codex currently relies on the default WSL distro when launching.

➜ ~ wsl -l -v
  NAME              STATE           VERSION
* docker-desktop    Stopped         2
  aimuo             Running         2
➜ ~ wsl --set-default aimuo
操作成功完成。
➜ ~ wsl -l -v
  NAME              STATE           VERSION
* aimuo             Running         2
  docker-desktop    Stopped         2

[rainx0r]

I'm also getting this issue but the issue for me is not WSL defaulting to Docker Desktop, it's that my WSL distro (NixOS) actually doesn't have bash at the system level, only zsh.

It would be great if Codex on Windows through WSL could work with any bash-compatible shell.