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Developer Ditches Repeated WSL Installs by Containerizing Shared MCP Server Stack

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A developer managing multiple Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) instances found that manually replicating a complex MCP server stack across each distro led to environmental drift, broken scripts, and wasted debugging time. After a failed attempt to script identical setups across WSL instances with differing systemd behavior, user IDs, and Node versions, the decision was made to containerize the entire stack instead. A single Docker container now runs the oh-my-mcp gateway and OpenCode server under supervisord, with shared volume mounts for config and data persistence. Any WSL instance can access the unified environment via a single docker exec command, eliminating per-distro npm installs and configuration inconsistencies. The key insight was that a reproducible deployment story matters even for small multi-instance setups, and that debugging installation paths is a sign the architecture needs rethinking.

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