Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Using OpenVPN apt repositories
3. Installing OpenVPN
4. Notes on expired keys

Introduction

Latest OpenVPN releases are also available in the OpenVPN project's apt repositories. This allow you to use more up-to-date version of OpenVPN than what's 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. This is so for two reasons:

• Official Debian and Ubuntu repositories tend to have fairly old OpenVPN versions available
• There are fairly up-to-date versions of OpenVPN releases available in places such as ​RepoForge (previously RPMForge) for RedHat derivatives. Also, Fedora typically has the latest upstream version in its repositories.

All packages are available in i386 and amd64/x86_64 flavours. 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 encountered any issues with the package, please file a new bug report.

Using OpenVPN apt repositories

We maintain several OpenVPN (OSS) software repositories. To setup 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:

$ wget -O - https://swupdate.openvpn.net/repos/repo-public.gpg|apt-key add -

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 http://build.openvpn.net/debian/openvpn/<version> <osrelease> main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openvpn-aptrepo.list

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

and <osrelease> depends your distribution:

• wheezy (Debian 7.x)
• jessie (Debian 8.x)
• precise (Ubuntu 12.04)
• trusty (Ubuntu 14.04)
• xenial (Ubuntu 16.04)

Examples:

$ echo "deb http://build.openvpn.net/debian/openvpn/testing jessie main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openvpn-aptrepo.list
$ echo "deb http://build.openvpn.net/debian/openvpn/release/2.3 wheezy 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 newer release of the same operating system.

Installing OpenVPN

On Debian/Ubuntu use

$ apt-get update && apt-get install openvpn

Notes on expired keys

If the apt signing key expires, apt will complain when refreshing the package cache (e.g. apt-get update). To fix this remove the expired key from apt keychain:

$ apt-key del E158C569

Then add the new key using wget and apt-key as described above. Then verify that the new key is in the keychain:

$ apt-key list
--- snip ---
/etc/apt/trusted.gpg
--------------------
pub   2048R/E158C569 2011-08-03 [expires: 2017-08-04]
uid                  Samuli Seppänen (OpenVPN Technologies, Inc) <samuli@openvpn.net>
sub   2048R/F5699905 2011-08-03 [expires: 2017-08-04]
--- snip ---