This is the recommended way of building openvpn-gui on Windows, which is also used when doing OpenVPN Windows releases.

- Visual Studio 2019 (build tools should be enough, also 2022 will likely work)

- CMake

- vcpkg (add the environment variable ``VCPKG_ROOT`` which points to vcpkg installation)

Run inside MSVC command prompt:

To see all presets, run:

You could also open CMake project from MSVC IDE and build from there.

This information is adapted from [Selva's](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.network.openvpn.devel/10516/focus=10531) and [David's](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.network.openvpn.devel/10516/focus=10531) emails to openvpn-devel mailing list.

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Cross compiling on linux is possible. If the change-password feature is enabled (this is the default), openssl library built for the target (windows) is required. This may be cross-compiled from source or if you are building on Fedora, MinGW has a decent set of cross-compiled libraries available out of the box. The following assumes that the openssl library and include files are installed in $HOME/windows/.

These instructions have been tested on Debian Jessie with automake, mingw-w64 and dependencies installed.

Starting from a clone of the gui repo from github, do

```$ autoreconf -i -v```

Run configure as

```$ ./configure --prefix=/ --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --build=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --program-prefix=* OPENSSL_CRYPTO_CFLAGS="-I $HOME/windows/include/" OPENSSL_CRYPTO_LIBS="-L $HOME/windows/lib/ -lcrypto"```

Replace, $HOME/windows by the location of openssl include and libs. If disabling change-password is ok, run configure as

```$ ./configure --prefix=/ --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --build=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --program-prefix=* CFLAGS=-DDISABLE_CHANGE_PASSWORD OPENSSL_CRYPTO_LIBS="-L./" OPENSSL_CRYPTO_CFLAGS="-I./"```

Then run make:

```$ make```

Optionally use -j n with make.

That will build openvpn-gui.exe. The exec can be installed manually by copying to the folder where other OpenVPN binaries are installed (```C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\bin``` by default).