Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Generic instructions
3. Converting certificates to PKCS12 format
4. Build environment -specific instructions
   1. Automated setup for Ubuntu
   2. Manual setup for Ubuntu
   3. Windows

Introduction

You can use the generic buildsystem from ​openvpn-build subproject to cross-compile OpenVPN using any toolchain to any target environment. The build host must have a *NIX-like environment, e.g. Linux, *BSD or Cygwin (on Windows).

Generic instructions

You need to install a bunch of tools before attempting a build:

• ​mingw-w64, version 2.0.x.
• gcc-*-arm-linux-gnueabi (if building Arm binaries)
• ​Git
• ​man2html (for windows-nsis builds)
• ​dos2unix (for windows-nsis builds)
• ​NSIS: if you need support for riducuously long PATHs, you need to build NSIS yourself.
• ​osslsigncode version 1.4 or later (pkcs12 support needed). Earlier versions can be used with minor modifications to the codesign() method in the build scripts.

Converting certificates to PKCS12 format

If you have code-signing certificates generated with MS tools (.spc and .pvk files), you can convert them into standard (pkcs12) format using this script. If that fails, look at this old version of this page for manual instructions.

You can also create self-signed certificate for testing like this:

$ openssl req -newkey rsa:1024 -new -x509 -subj "/CN=test1" -out test.crt	
$ openssl pkcs12 -export -inkey privkey.pem -in test.crt -out test.p12	

Once you have the pkcs12 archive, you can give it and it's password as argument to the buildsystem(s). For details, look here:

• Building Windows NSIS installer
• Building tap-windows

Build environment -specific instructions

Automated setup for Ubuntu

Manual setup for Ubuntu

On Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10 (64-bit) you most build dependencies are satisfied if you run the following command:

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install git-core mingw-w64 gcc-4.6-arm-linux-gnueabi man2html dos2unix nsis unzip

If you intend to build Windows installers with OpenVPN-GUI, you need to install a modified MinGW version.

If you wish to sign the release files (executables, libraries and installers), you need to build ​osslsigncode manually. First install OpenSSL and Curl development libraries:

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev build-essential

The curl library is used for timestamping support. Extract the osslsigncode tarball and issue the usual commands:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

This will put osslsigncode in PATH where the build system can find it.

Windows

If you're building using Cygwin on Windows, it's best to configure Git not to translate LF to CR/LF. For this reason it's probably best to use Cygwin's Git. Also take a look at Cygwin's README to see which packages are required.