Distributing Tunnelblick and Configurations

Tunnelblick is free software made available under the GNU General Public License, version 2 and may be distributed only in accordance with the terms of that license.

A Tunnelblick VPN Configuration (".tblk") can include settings. See Tunnelblick VPN Configurations Details: Preferences.

An easy way to distribute Tunnelblick with VPN configurations is to distribute your VPN configurations bundled together with Tunnelblick in a notarized disk image. The configurations will be installed automatically when the user installs the Tunnelblick application. See Auto-Install Configurations for details.

You can also distribute configurations without Tunnelblick and have your users install them by dropping them on the Tunnelblick icon in the menu bar.

To do this, your users must first download and install Tunnelblick. Then they can install configurations by dropping them on the Tunnelblick icon in the menu bar. You can "nest" configurations inside an outer configuration so that the user only needs to drop the outer configuration on the icon to install all of the configurations.

You can also distribute configurations together with Tunnelblick settings as exported Tunnelblick setups.

Tunnelblick can export the configurations and settings that are present on a computer (including all users' configurations and settings). This can be used to copy a Tunnelblick setup to a new computer. The export file can be expanded into a .tblkSetup package. That package has a simple file hierarchy which can be easily edited and then recompressed and the compressed file distributed.

A more complex way of distributing configurations along with Tunnelblick is to create a "Deployed" version of Tunnelblick:

• Deployed versions of Tunnelblick must be built from rebranded source code and the rebranded source code must be made available to anyone to whom a binary is "distributed" as defined by the GPL.
• A "Deployed" version contains, within the Tunnelblick application itself, all of the configurations, certificates, keys, and scripts needed for the connection(s) that you wish to make available.
• A "Deployed" version can also contain "forced" preferences, which the user is not allowed to override, which can avoid problems caused by users inadvertently changing critical configuration parameters.
• Because a "Deployed" version contains the configurations within the program, when the program is updated, the configurations are updated.
• Any user of the computer can connect using the configuration(s).