Recently I wanted to get a VPN connection from a phone to an openvpn server. The openvpn app only provides two or three options for getting your ovpn file: 1) use itunes, 2) go to a website in safari that has the .ovpn file, or 3) send via mail.

Option 1 was out since the phone was locked down enough to not permit me to transfer apps. Not sure why – likely just a policy of the phone (i dont own the phone).

Option 3 is less secure so I skipped that.

Option 2 is easy – I only had to make a few mods off what I found via Mr. Google:

• Make the .ovpn file have a unified format. Some places on the internet suggested you could have configuraiton lines that looked like the following:

  ca [inline]
  cert [inline]
  key [inline]
  

  However this doesn’t actually work. Instead, just delete those lines and stuff the ca, cert, key, and tls keys under the appropriate tags (they have the same name as the config lines)

• Ensure your web server has the right mime type. The .ovpn mime type is “application/x-openvpn-profile”, and can be added to your httpd.conf like this:

  
<IfModule mime_module>
...
AddType application/x-openvpn-profile .ovpn
...


I then pointed my browser at the .ovpn file, at which point safari recognizes that you can open it in openvpn. All worked marvellously thereafter.