Getting tap-windows – community wiki

# Introduction 

OpenVPN [was split](/ChangesInOpenvpn23) into several subprojects between 2.3-alpha1 -> 2.3-alpha2 releases. [Tap-windows](https://github.com/OpenVPN/tap-windows) is an NDIS 5 driver which provides tap adapter capabilities on Windows. Support for NDIS 5 will be dropped in future Windows versions, which is why tap-windows has been deprecated by [tap-windows6](https://github.com/OpenVPN/tap-windows6) that uses NDIS 6 instead. Here's a table that shows the relation between the driver versions:

|**Installer name**|**Project name**|**NDIS version**|**Operating system**|
|-|-|-|-|
|tap-windows-9.21.2  |tap-windows6      |6|Windows Vista and above|
|tap-windows-9.9.2_3 |tap-windows       |5|Windows XP|

# Fetching tap-windows source code

To fetch tap-windows (NDIS 5) use

```
$ git clone https://github.com/OpenVPN/tap-windows.git
```

To fetch tap-windows (NDIS 6) use

```
$ git clone https://github.com/OpenVPN/tap-windows6.git
```

# Getting tap-windows releases

All tap-windows releases are available in a number of places:

 * http://swupdate.openvpn.net/community/releases/tap-windows-<version\>.exe
 * http://swupdate.openvpn.net/community/releases/tap-windows-<version\>.zip
 * http://build.openvpn.net/downloads/releases (browseable)
 * [GitHub downloads page](https://github.com/OpenVPN/tap-windows/downloads)