Building the OpenVPN-GUI on Windows

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

Prerequisites

• 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)

Build steps

Run inside MSVC command prompt:

    c:\Temp\openvpn-gui>cmake -S . --preset x64-release-ossl3
    c:\Temp\openvpn-gui>cmake --build --preset x64-release-ossl3

To see all presets, run:

  C:\Users\lev\Projects\openvpn-gui>cmake -S c:\Users\lev\Projects\openvpn-gui --list-presets
  Available configure presets:
  "x64-debug-ossl3"
  "x64-debug-ossl1.1.1"
  "arm64-debug-ossl3"
  "arm64-debug-ossl1.1.1"
  "x86-debug-ossl3"
  "x86-debug-ossl1.1.1"
  "x64-release-ossl3"
  "x64-release-ossl1.1.1"
  "arm64-release-ossl3"
  "arm64-release-ossl1.1.1"
  "x86-release-ossl3"
  "x86-release-ossl1.1.1"

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

Building OpenVPN-GUI on Linux

This information is adapted from ​Selva's and ​David's 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.

Steps -- building for 64 bit windows

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).