OpenVPN Support Forum

Good day Open VPN fans.

We've been using Tunnelblick on our MacOS systems for the longest time to connect to our OpenVPN CE server.

Now the OpenVPN GUI finally being available for MacOS seems like a great replacement for that, but for the life of me cannot figure out how I could deploy the .ovpn file to users without asking them to manually install it.

Is there a particular folder or location I'm not aware of to drop the .ovpn file so it's automatically loaded on the first startup?

Hello shaun-onul,

I suspect that perhaps you are confusing OpenVPN GUI with OpenVPN Connect. OpenVPN GUI is the open source client for Windows. Tunnelblick is the open source client for macOS. OpenVPN Connect is the commercial client that is available for macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android. I suspect that is the client you mentioned, but I'm not entirely sure.

With OpenVPN Access Server and OpenVPN Cloud we support bundling profiles, meaning when you download the OpenVPN Connect software from those commercial products, they come with a client profile automatically already bundled inside it, available right after installation. For Windows we also support an alternate method where if you launch the MSI installer file without a bundled profile, but it finds the file 'bundled.ovpn' in the same directory as the installer, it will use that. This function is only available on OpenVPN Connect v3 on Windows.

Regarding what you want to achieve, since you're using the community edition server, I don't have any answer for you there. The community server doesn't do bundling of the profiles in the way I just described, so they will just have to manually install it.

I do believe though that you can (double)click on a .ovpn file to open it. The OpenVPN Connect v3 client program will then open and offer to import it. That's about as easy as we can make it for you there.

I hope that information helps. Kind regards,
Johan

Hi Johan.

I am very much referring to the OpenVPN Connect client and yes exactly as you say this can be done with OpenVPN Access Server so I would imagine it's possible to do the same and "pre-bundle" it with the DMG for the OpenVPN Connect client but I have been unable to do so, hence the post.

And yeah because I found that method available for Windows I anticipated the same would be possible on MacOS and that I was just doing it wrong, but you've now pretty much confirmed I shouldn't be expecting this to work so that helps already.

Double-clicking is certainly and option but we were hoping to make OpenVPN an "optional" at this point and therefore Tunnelblick is holding onto the association. It also means we still need to get the profile file to the user which isn't required for Tunnelblick where we simply pre-bundle it. Partly why I kind of expected this to be an option from the official and otherwise much better client, over the third party one from Tunnelblick.

We'll leave it for our more advanced users to do manually then.

Thanks for the response.

Shaun

Hello Shaun,

Once OpenVPN Connect v3.3 comes out, we'll have command line ability to load profiles. That way you can run a script that installs OpenVPN Connect v3.3 and then load some profile and have it preconfigured for the user. Perhaps that will then satisfy your need. But regarding the bundling of profiles - that's something that we do in Access Server and Cloud, our commercial products. It's kind of hard to explain here how to do it as it requires manipulating the files themselves with program code. It's not like you just drag and drop a file in there somewhere.

Kind regards,
Johan

Glad to hear about these CLI options coming in v3.3— that is going to be useful for sure.