OpenVPN

OpenVPN is a secure tunneling daemon, and this repository is the community source tree behind it, distributed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License. The README offers no product tour, only what an administrator needs to fetch the source, build it, and find the reference material that explains the rest.

Building follows the familiar Unix sequence. Unpack the release tarball, run configure, then make and make install, with the INSTALL file covering the details. Windows builds with MinGW or MSVC are described separately in the CMake readme, and released versions are published on the community downloads page rather than assembled by hand.

The source distribution ships samples worth reading before writing a configuration of your own.

• Sample config files: a collection of configurations and scripts taken from the project HOWTO.
• Sample keys: RSA keys and certificates for testing only, deliberately insecure and never for real deployments.
• verify-cn: a Perl script for the tls-verify option, showing a custom authentication test against embedded X509 certificate fields.
• ssl.h: the header describing the protocol underneath OpenVPN.

Detailed usage lives in the man page and the HOWTO, both maintained on the project website rather than in the tree.

Two former parts of the source now live as their own subprojects, easy-rsa for certificate management and tap-windows6 for the Windows driver, while community MSI installers and Debian packages are built from the separate openvpn-build repository.