BUILD.md

How to build openvpn3-linux locally

The primary Linux distributions targeted and regularly tested are:

• Debian 11 and newer
• Fedora 38 and newer
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 and newer
• Ubuntu 20.04 and newer

This list is not an exclusive list, and it will most likely work on all other distributions with recent enough dependencies.

The following dependencies are needed:

• A C++ compiler capable of at least -std=c++17

• Meson Build System 0.58 or newer

  https://mesonbuild.com/

• OpenSSL 1.1.1 or newer

  https://www.openssl.org/

• GDBus++ v1 or newer

  https://codeberg.org/OpenVPN/gdbuspp/

• GLib2 2.56 or newer

  http://www.gtk.org

• jsoncpp 0.10.5 or newer

  https://github.com/open-source-parsers/jsoncpp

• libcap-ng 0.7.5 or newer

  http://people.redhat.com/sgrubb/libcap-ng

• liblz4 1.8.4 or newer

  https://lz4.github.io/lz4

• libuuid 2.23.2 or newer

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Util-linux

• polkit 0.112 or newer

  http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/polkit

  Only needed when using the systemd-resolved integration. On Ubuntu this package is called policykit-1.

• tinyxml2 2.1.0 or newer

  https://github.com/leethomason/tinyxml2

• (optional) libnl3 3.2.29 or newer

  http://www.infradead.org/~tgr/libnl/

  Only needed when building with DCO support

• (optional) protobuf 2.4.0 or newer

  http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/

  Only needed when building with DCO support

• (optional) Python 3.6 or newer

  If Python 3.6 or newer is found, the openvpn2, openvpn3-autoload utilities and the openvpn3 Python module will be built and installed.

• (optional) Python docutils

  http://docutils.sourceforge.net/ This is needed for the rst2man utility, used to generate the man pages.

• (optional) Python Jinja2 template engine

  https://palletsprojects.com/p/jinja/ Required when enabling the bash-completion support; used to generate the bash-completion script for openvpn2.

• (optional) selinux-policy-devel

  For Linux distributions running with SELinux in enforced mode (like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora), this is required.

NOTE: This project has recently switched to use Meson. The documentation migth not be 100% up-to-date on all details.

       In addition, the GDBus++ library is also very new.  This is
       currently not available in upstream repositories.  Install the
       OpenVPN provided package repositories first to get the needed
       packages - or build it from source

First install the package dependencies needed to run the build.

Debian/Ubuntu:

• Building with OpenSSL:

  For newer Debian and Ubuntu releases shipping with OpenSSL 1.1 or newer:

  # apt-get install 
  

• Generic build requirements:

  # apt-get install build-essential git pkg-config meson libglib2.0-dev \
                    libjsoncpp-dev uuid-dev liblz4-dev libcap-ng-dev    \
                    libxml2-utils python3-minimal python3-dbus          \
                    python3-docutils python3-jinja2 libxml2-utils       \
                    libtinyxml2-dev policykit-1 libsystemd-dev          \
                    python3-systemd libssl-dev libssl1.1 libgdbuspp-dev
  

• Dependencies to build with DCO support:

  # apt-get install libnl-3-dev libnl-genl-3-dev protobuf-compiler libprotobuf-dev
  

Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux:

• Generic build requirements:

  # yum install gcc-c++ git meson pkgconfig glib2-devel jsoncpp-devel    \
                libuuid-devel libcap-ng-devel selinux-policy-devel       \
                lz4-devel zlib-devel libxml2 tinyxml2-devel python3-dbus \
                python3-gobject python3-pyOpenSSL python3-jinja2         \
                python3-docutils bzip2 polkit systemd-devel              \
                python3-systemd openssl-devel gdbuspp-devel
  

• Dependencies to build with DCO support:

  # yum install libnl3-devel protobuf-compiler protobuf protobuf-devel
  

Preparations building from git

• Clone this git repository: git clone git://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn3-linux
• Enter the openvpn3-linux directory: cd openvpn3-linux
• Run: ./bootstrap.sh

Adding the openvpn user and group accounts

The default configuration for the services assumes a service account openvpn to be present. If it does not exist you should add one, e.g. by:

# groupadd -r openvpn
# useradd -r -s /sbin/nologin -g openvpn openvpn

Building OpenVPN 3 Linux client

If you already have a ./configure script or have retrieved an openvpn3-linux-*.tar.xz tarball generated by make dist, the following steps will build the client.

• Run: meson setup --prefix=/usr _builddir
• Run: meson compile -C _builddir
• Run (as root): meson install -C _builddir
• Run (as root): openvpn3-admin init-config --write-configs

You might need to also reload D-Bus configuration to make D-Bus aware of the newly installed service. On most system this happens automatically but occasionally a manual operation is needed:

# systemctl reload dbus

With everything built and installed, it should be possible to run both the openvpn2 and openvpn3 command line tools - even as an unprivileged user.

AWS-VPC integration

The OpenVPN 3 Linux AWS-VPC add-on is currently unavailable. This will be reintroduced in a later release.

Auto-completion helper for bash/zsh

If you want to also install the bash-completion scripts for the openvpn2 and openvpn3 commands, add -Dbash-completion=enabled to the meson setup command, or run:

 $ meson configure -Dbash-completion=enabled _builddir

from the root of the project directory.