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CHAPTER 3
Installing Asterisk
I long to accomplish great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks
as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty
shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
—Helen Keller
In this chapter we’re going to walk through the installation of Asterisk from the
source code. Many people shy away from this method, claiming that it is too difficult
and time-consuming. Our goal here is to demonstrate that installing Asterisk from
source is not actually that difficult to do. More importantly, we want to provide you
with the best Asterisk platform on which to learn.
In this book we will be helping you build a functioning Asterisk system from scratch.
Toward that goal, in this chapter we will build a base platform for your Asterisk sys‐
tem. Since we are installing from source, there is potentially a lot of variation in how
you can do this. Our goal here is to deliver a standard sort of platform, suitable for
explorations in many areas. It is possible to strip Asterisk down to the very basics and
run a very lean machine; however, that exercise is left up to the reader. The process
we discuss here is designed to get you up and running quickly and simply, without
short-changing you on access to interesting features.
Most of the commands you see are going to be best handled with a series of copy-
paste operations (in fact, we strongly recommend you have an electronic version of
this book handy for that very purpose).1 While it looks like a lot of typing, the com‐
mands we take you through can get you from start to finish in less than 30 minutes,
1 It’s been released under a Creative Commons license, so if you have purchased a hard copy (and we thank
you!), you can also download a soft copy for searching and copying/pasting.
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so it’s really not as complex as it might appear. We run some prerequisites, some com‐
pilation, and some post-install config, and Asterisk is ready to go.
For the sake of brevity, these steps will be performed on a CentOS 7 system. This is
functionally equivalent to RHEL, and similar enough to Fedora that the steps should
be quite similar. For other platforms such as Debian/Ubuntu and so forth, the
instructions will also be similar, but you will need to adjust as needed for your
platform.2
The first part of the installation instructions will not deal with Asterisk as such, but
rather some of the dependencies that either Asterisk requires or are necessary for
some of the more useful features (such as database integration). We’ll try to keep the
instructions general enough that they should be useful on any distribution of your
choice.
These instructions assume that you are an experienced Linux administrator.3 A fully
working Asterisk system will consist of enough discrete parts that you will find it
challenging to deal with all of it if you have little or no Linux background. We’d still
encourage you to dive right in, but please allow for the fact that there will be a steep
learning curve if you don’t already have solid Linux command-line experience.
If you want to learn the Linux command line, one of the best books
we’ve found is The Linux Command Line by William Shotts, which
has been released under a Creative Commons license, and dives
straight into all the knowledge you need to use the Linux shell
effectively. It can be found at linuxcommand.org. You could memo‐
rize the book from front to back, and pretty much everything you’d
learned would be something any seasoned Linux administrator
would agree was worth knowing.
Another fantastic book is of course the legendary UNIX and Linux
System Administration Handbook by Dan Mackin, Ben Whaley,
Trent R. Hein, Garth Snyder, and Evi Nemeth (Prentice Hall).
Highly recommended.
2 Asterisk should run on pretty much any Linux platform, and if you are familiar with the basic process of
installing software on a Linux machine, you should find Asterisk a fairly straightforward installation.
3 By which we mostly mean that you are comfortable administering a system exclusively from the shell.
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Chapter 3: Installing Asterisk
Asterisk Packages
There are Asterisk packages that can be installed using package management systems
such as yum or apt-get. You are encouraged to use them once you are familiar with
Asterisk.
If you are using RHEL, Asterisk is available from the EPEL repository from the
Fedora project. Asterisk packages are available in the Universe repository for Ubuntu.
You should also note that because of Asterisk’s history, it is able to integrate with a
multitude of telephony technologies; however, these days, someone new to Asterisk is
going to want to learn SIP integration before worrying about more complex, obsolete
or peripheral channel types. Once you are comfortable with Asterisk in a pure SIP
environment, it’ll be much easier to look at integrating other channel types.
Asterisk-Based Projects
Many projects use Asterisk as their underlying platform. Some of these, such as the
FreePBX GUI, have become so popular that many people mistake them for the Aster‐
isk product itself. In fact, the FreePBX GUI is so ubiquitous it is found in most of the