Antigravity IDE WSL Project Crash

Google Antigravity
1

Bug Report: Antigravity IDE WSL Project Crash

Status: Resolved

Priority: Critical

Date: 2026-01-25

1. Issue Summary

The Antigravity IDE was crashing during the “Resolving Authority” phase when attempting to start a WSL project. The application logs indicated a failure to parse the output of the server installation script:


[Error - 18:09:23.748] Error resolving authority

Error: Failed parsing install script output

at t.installCodeServer (extension.js:1:19964)

2. Technical Investigation & Root Cause

After analyzing the extension source code in antigravity-remote-wsl/dist/extension.js, I identified a quoting conflict between the Windows host and the WSL guest environment.

The Conflict:

  • Process Spawning: The extension used child_process.spawn('wsl.exe', ...) with the { windowsVerbatimArguments: true } option.

  • Quoting Logic: The extension manually wrapped the bash -c command in single quotes (').

  • Win32 Protocol: Under the Win32 CreateProcess API, single quotes are not recognized as argument delimiters. When windowsVerbatimArguments is enabled, Node.js does not perform any escaping, passing the raw string to wsl.exe.

  • Result: wsl.exe received a broken command line truncated at the first space. Since the installation script begins with a comment (# Server installation script), the shell executed only the # character and exited successfully with no output, triggering the parsing error.

3. Resolution

I implemented a robust fix by transitioning the process runner to follow standard Win32 argument conventions:

  1. Disabled Verbatim Arguments: Set windowsVerbatimArguments: false in the WSLManager class. This delegating quoting responsibilities to Node.js, which correctly uses double quotes (") for Windows compatibility.

  2. Normalized Script Injection: Removed manual single-quote wrapping in installCodeServer. The script is now passed as a raw string, ensuring the entire block is received by the WSL distribution’s shell.

4. Verification

Reproduced the issue with a standalone script (repro_quote_bug.js) and verified that disabling windowsVerbatimArguments allows the full script (including spaces and newlines) to be processed correctly by wsl.exe.

Report generated by Antigravity AI.

2

The issue is still coming up. Antigravity works terribly in Windows, WSL or not.

[Trace - 12:49:04.894] Passed server install script
[Trace - 12:49:04.996] Server install command stderr:
[Trace - 12:49:04.996] Server install command stdout:
S�e� �h�a� �f�o�r�z�a�d�o� �l�a� �i�n�t�e�r�r�u�p�c�i���n� �d�e� �u�n�a� �c�o�n�e�x�i���n� �e�x�i�s�t�e�n�t�e� �p�o�r� �e�l� �h�o�s�t� �r�e�m�o�t�o�.� �

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�C���d�i�g�o� �d�e� �e�r�r�o�r�:� �W�s�l�/�S�e�r�v�i�c�e�/�0�x�8�0�0�7�2�7�4�6�

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[Error - 12:49:04.996] Error resolving authority
Error: Failed parsing install script output
at t.installCodeServer (c:\Users\$USER\AppData\Local\Programs\Antigravity\resources\app\extensions\antigravity-remote-wsl\dist\extension.js:1:23014)
at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:105:5)
at async c:\Users\$USER\AppData\Local\Programs\Antigravity\resources\app\extensions\antigravity-remote-wsl\dist\extension.js:1:34712
3

The garbled output looks like an encoding mismatch between WSL and the IDE. Can you check what locale returns in your WSL instance? Also try setting export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 in your WSL shell before launching. WSL2 handles terminal encoding differently than WSL1.