Home A - Z
Page Index

An Otter Wiki

Introduction

This page contains instructions for using the OpenVPN project's own software repositories. For a list of unofficial repositories, please refer to the Unofficial OpenVPN software repositories page.

For OpenVPN 3 Linux, see the dedicated OpenVPN 3 Linux page.

The latest OpenVPN releases are available in the OpenVPN project's apt repositories. This allows you to use a more up-to-date version of OpenVPN than what is typically available in your distribution's repositories. Please note that all commands listed below have to be run as root, e.g. using sudo or su.

Pre-built Linux binaries are only available for Debian and Ubuntu for the following reasons:

  • Official Debian and Ubuntu repositories tend to have fairly old OpenVPN versions available.
  • Fedora and Fedora EPEL provide fairly up-to-date OpenVPN releases for supported Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (including clones such as CentOS, Scientific Linux) releases.

All packages are available in amd64/x86_64 flavors. Additionally, arm64/aarch64 flavors might be available for newer distributions and i386 flavor might be available for older distributions. Even if a package is built on a particular OS, it does not mean it won't work on older and/or newer versions of the same distro, or even on a different operating system. If you encounter any issues with the package, please file a new bug report.

CentOS / Fedora / Red Hat Enterprise Linux

There are two alternatives here for OpenVPN packages. Fedora carries a reasonably up-to-date release in the main repositories. For CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the Fedora EPEL repositories contain the last OpenVPN releases when the distribution was released. All of these packages are considered to be stable for enterprise usage and will essentially just get bug and security fixes during the lifetime of the distribution. OpenVPN major releases will only be added to the next Fedora release.

Using Fedora EPEL (CentOS / RHEL)

Ensure you have the Fedora EPEL repository enabled. CentOS users may do this easily by installing the epel-release package via yum install. Red Hat Enterprise Linux users need to install this package manually, as described in the Fedora EPEL wiki page. Then just run:

yum install openvpn

Using Fedora Copr

CentOS/RHEL users: Ensure you have the yum-plugin-copr package installed (can be installed via yum).

Then run these commands:

yum copr enable dsommers/openvpn-release-2.6   # for OpenVPN 2.6 releases
yum copr enable dsommers/openvpn-release       # for OpenVPN 2.5 releases
...
yum install openvpn

The dsommers/openvpn-release-2.6 Copr repository currently contains the latest stable OpenVPN release.

The dsommers/openvpn-release Copr repository contains the latest 2.5.x OpenVPN release. For new installations, it is recommended to use the 2.6.x release, 2.5.x releases are only provided for a short period to give users some time to migrate to 2.6. For details see SupportedVersions.

To test OpenVPN beta releases, the dsommers/openvpn-beta Copr repository contains builds for all recent Fedora, Red hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS/CentOS Stream releases.

There are also nightly builds of the master branch available in the dsommers/openvpn-git Copr repository. Testing is welcome but not intended for production use!

If you have OpenVPN already installed, it will be upgraded to the latest available version.

Data Channel Offload support (DCO)

The Data Channel Offload support is available in OpenVPN 2.6 beta releases and newer and in OpenVPN 3 Linux. The needed Linux kernel module is available for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and newer. To get the needed kmod-ovpn-dco package, the dsommers/openvpn3 Copr repository needs to be enabled as well.

Debian / Ubuntu: Using OpenVPN apt repositories

We maintain several OpenVPN (OSS) software repositories. To set up the repositories, you need to change to the root user. Typically this is done using sudo:

sudo -s

Then import the public GPG key that is used to sign the packages:

mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings # directory does not exist on older releases
curl -fsSL https://swupdate.openvpn.net/repos/repo-public.gpg | gpg --dearmor > /etc/apt/keyrings/openvpn-repo-public.gpg

Next, you need to create a sources.list fragment (as root) so that apt can find the new OpenVPN packages. One way to do it is this:

echo "deb [arch=<arch> signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/openvpn-repo-public.gpg] https://build.openvpn.net/debian/openvpn/<version> <osrelease> main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openvpn-aptrepo.list

Where <arch> can be one of:

  1. amd64
  2. arm64

Where <version> can be one of:

  1. stable: stable releases only - no alphas, betas, or RCs
  2. testing: latest releases, including alphas/betas/RCs
  3. release/2.3: OpenVPN 2.3 releases
  4. release/2.4: OpenVPN 2.4 releases, including alphas/betas/RCs
  5. release/2.5: OpenVPN 2.5 releases, including alphas/betas/RCs
  6. release/2.6: OpenVPN 2.6 releases, including alphas/betas/RCs

and <osrelease> depends on your distribution:

  • buster (Debian 10.x)
  • bullseye (Debian 11.x)
  • bookworm (Debian 12.x)
  • focal (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS)
  • jammy (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS)
  • noble (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS)
  • oracular (Ubuntu 24.10)

This list may be incomplete. Please check the repository web page for the complete list of releases.

Examples:

# Always get the latest package, even Beta versions
echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/openvpn-repo-public.gpg] http://build.openvpn.net/debian/openvpn/testing jammy main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openvpn-aptrepo.list
# Only get a specific version, do not upgrade to newer major version automatically
echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/openvpn-repo-public.gpg] http://build.openvpn.net/debian/openvpn/release/2.6 bullseye main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openvpn-aptrepo.list

Now you're set for installing OpenVPN. Note that packages built for older operating system releases might work just fine on a newer release of the same operating system.

Installing OpenVPN

On Debian/Ubuntu use:

apt-get update && apt-get install openvpn

To additionally install the DCO kernel driver use:

apt-get install openvpn-dco-dkms

Notes on expired keys

If the apt signing key expires, apt will complain when refreshing the package cache (e.g. apt-get update). In that case, just download the key again as described above.

Debian Snapshot Builds

Debian snapshot development builds are available as well. To use them:

mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings # directory does not exist on older Debian/Ubuntu releases
curl -fsSL https://build.openvpn.net/debian/snapshots/snapshots-key.asc > /etc/apt/keyrings/openvpn-repo-snapshots.asc
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/openvpn-repo-snapshots.asc] https://build.openvpn.net/debian/snapshots/<osrelease> <osrelease> main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openvpn-snapshots.list
apt-get install openvpn

To test a specific build with a specific patch, you might need to install a specific snapshot build. You can do this with apt by providing the exact version to install:

apt-get install openvpn=2.7-1719406367

See https://build.openvpn.net/debian/snapshots/ for a current list of valid osrelease values. Only amd64 snapshot builds are available currently.

Note that these are intended to provide an easy way to test patches or the latest master, not for production use. If you notice any problems, let us know!