Include Windows Terminal in Windows Sandbox

[Stanzilla]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

Currently, Windows Sandbox does not come with Windows Terminal, it would be nice to have it installed in there by default.

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

[zadjii-msft]

Huh. I kinda just imagined that Windows Sandbox would use the same build as the host OS, so if you're on Windows 11, the Terminal would be preinstalled there just the same as it is on the host...

[Stanzilla]

Huh. I kinda just imagined that Windows Sandbox would use the same build as the host OS, so if you're on Windows 11, the Terminal would be preinstalled there just the same as it is on the host...

I thought the same but it looks like it is super stripped down, can't even install store apps etc.

[roysubs]

Windows Sandbox is a completely stripped down image. Hence, Microsoft won't include requests for application X, Y, Z to be included. The problem here is that no Store (Metro) app can be installed in Windows Sandbox (including Terminal). Hopefully, Microsoft will include Store support in a future update as this is quite a big omission, considering that it is Microsoft's own app deployment technology for Windows(!)

[carlos-zamora]

Tracking internally with MSFT:36913286

[arc-hbas]

@carlos-zamora any updates from that internal track?

[carlos-zamora]

Nope. No updates still.

[arc-hbas]

Thanks for the quick reply @carlos-zamora!

For those of you still wanting some way to execute Windows Terminal within a sandbox, I would suggest downloading and extracting the portable ZIP (see details here). You can automate this somewhat with windows sandbox by creating a wsb configuration file (see here) and executing a script on logon to download and extract the Windows Terminal portable zip.

DownloadWindowsTerminal.ps1

Invoke-WebRequest "https://aka.ms/terminal-canary-zip-x64" -OutFile "$home\Downloads\Terminal.zip"
Expand-Archive "$home\Downloads\Terminal.zip" -DestinationPath "$env:ProgramFiles\Windows Terminal"

# Other logic to add start menu and desktop shortcuts....

Windows Sandbox Dev.wsb

<Configuration>
  <MappedFolders>
    <MappedFolder>
      <HostFolder>C:\Users\{USER}\Desktop\ForSandbox</HostFolder>
      <ReadOnly>true</ReadOnly>
    </MappedFolder>
  </MappedFolders>
  <LogonCommand>
    <!-- Logon PS script how-to: https://stackoverflow.com/a/64812427/10388359 -->
    <Command>powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Command "start powershell {-noexit -File C:\Users\WDAGUtilityAccount\Desktop\ForSandbox\DownloadWindowsTerminal.ps1}"</Command>
  </LogonCommand>
</Configuration>

Here's a blog post that explains quite a bit more on how to pre-setup a dev-like environment. Author provides other scripts that generally work out of the box (minus one issue with winget).

Anyhow, thought I'd share.

Still would be nice if this worked out-of-the-box and would save us a bunch of prep time (installing winget + terminal takes ~5 mins!).