Install asterisk-16 with FreePBX-14 on CentOS

asterisk combined with FreePBX is a robust and feature rich IP-PBX that is used in small and large scale deployments. It can scale up with little to no effort and can be easily clustered for redundancy and larger capacity needs. Combined with the power of Linux – CentOS7 in this case, you can maintain, secure and integrate with almost anything.

While FreePBX offers both Stand-alone and an All-in-one Linux/asterisk/FPBX versions, this post is for the brave souls that prefer a manual approach. This will be the case if you are installing in a Cloud environment and don’t have physical access to the machine.

Watch the walk-through of this installation on our Youtube channel.

With introductions out of the way, let’s take a look at the packages that we’re using;

VPS with CentOS 7
asterisk v16
FreePBX v14
PJSIP v2.8

OS Pre-requisites

Assuming a new installation, let’s first make sure SELinux is disabled;

sestatus

If not,

sed -i 's/SELINUX=enforcing/SELINUX=disabled/g' /etc/selinux/config

reboot

Make sure we’re up-to date;

sudo yum -y update

reboot

Installing asterisk 16

Install dependency packages;

sudo yum -y install epel-release gcc-c++ ncurses-devel libxml2-devel wget openssl-devel newt-devel kernel-devel-uname -r sqlite-devel libuuid-devel gtk2-devel jansson-devel binutils-devel bzip2 patch libedit libedit-devel tftp-server \ ncurses-devel sendmail sendmail-cf sox newt-devel libxml2-devel libtiff-devel \ audiofile-devel gtk2-devel subversion kernel-devel git crontabs cronie \ cronie-anacron wget vim nano uuid-devel sqlite-devel net-tools

Add asterisk Firewall rules – This is optional and can be done later as well;

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-service={sip,sips} sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-port=10000-20000/udp sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-port=4569/udp

Verify:
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --list-services sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --list-ports

Build and Compile asterisk:

mkdir ~/build-asterisk cd ~/build-asterisk

Build PJSIP;

PJSIP is a SIP Protocol stack that seems poised to replace ChanSIP as the primary SIP driver in asterisk. Although I have had several issues using PJSIP and prefer ChanSIP configurations and commands, my personal needs will likely not influence the direction 😀 .. It does appear to be more robust than Chan, but not as polished just yet. You will also need to learn the new operators as the differ from the more familiar asterisk CLI commands. Read the list here.

More about PJSIPs technology here: https://www.pjsip.org/sip_media_features.htm

Let’s grab PJSIP, compile the flags and build it into the asterisk directory;

wget https://www.pjsip.org/release/2.8/pjproject-2.8.tar.bz2 tar -jxvf pjproject-2.8.tar.bz2 cd pjproject-2.8

Config options:

./configure CFLAGS="-DNDEBUG -DPJ_HAS_IPV6=1" --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64 --enable-shared --disable-video --disable-sound --disable-opencore-amr

Build dependencies:
make dep

Build:
make

Install:
sudo make install sudo ldconfig

Building asterisk;

Back to our build directory;
cd ~/build-asterisk

Download:
wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-16-current.tar.gz

Extract:
tar -zxvf asterisk-16-current.tar.gz

Enter dir:
cd asterisk-16.X.X

Enable MP3 Support (for MoH, recordings, etc);
sudo yum install svn contrib/scripts/get_mp3_source.sh

Configure and Build
./configure --libdir=/usr/lib64 --with-jansson-bundled

We now need to enable the MP3 support flag inside of the asterisk Add-ons list to compile;

make menuselect

Save & Exit

Finish up by building, compiling and generating the sample configs in /etc/asterisk/. Then ensure asterisk starts up at boot.

make make install make samples make config

Congrats! You have a working version of asterisk 16! If you’re not installing FreepBX, you can fire up asterisk and start configuring – systemctl start asterisk

For the rest of us, let’s move onward.

Installing FreePBX 14

At the time of this article, the FreePBX road-map on their own wiki seems to be outdated and unclear as to EOL on specific versions. That said, v14 seems to be the preferred Stable release and is used by their pre-compiled packages. We don’t much care about this since luckily FreePBX includes an auto update feature for it’s core inside the UI.

Install dependency source;
rpm -Uvh https://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el7/epel-release.rpm

For some very questionable reason, CentOS still comes with PHP 5.4. We need to enable the repo for 5.6 (although this is not ideal either, I will test with later versions and update).

rpm -Uvh https://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el7/webtatic-release.rpm

Install dependencies:

sudo yum install -y php56w php56w-opcache php56w-xml php56w-mcrypt php56w-gd php56w-devel php56w-mysql php56w-intl php56w-mbstring php56w-pear php56w-process mariadb-server mariadb httpd gnutls-devel unixODBC mysql-connector-odbc

Install a legacy component:
pear install Console_Getopt

Optionally setup our Web access firewall rules:
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=443/tcp --permanent firewall-cmd --reload

Enable MariaDB and Apache at startup:
systemctl enable mariadb.service systemctl enable httpd.service

Start-up Maria:
systemctl start mariadb

Run the mysql configuration script – Do NOT set a root password on the DB as the FreePBX install script will do this for us.
mysql_secure_installation

Create our asterisk user and group:
adduser asterisk -m -c "Asterisk User"

Set permissions on files and folders:
chown asterisk. /var/run/asterisk chown -R asterisk. /etc/asterisk chown -R asterisk. /var/{lib,log,spool}/asterisk chown -R asterisk. /usr/lib64/asterisk chown -R asterisk. /var/www/

Modify Apache:
sed -i 's/(^upload_max_filesize = )./\120M/' /etc/php.ini sed -i 's/^(User|Group)./\1 asterisk/' /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf sed -i 's/AllowOverride None/AllowOverride All/' /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Start Apache:
systemctl start httpd.service

Finally, download FreePBX and install;

cd /usr/src wget http://mirror.freepbx.org/modules/packages/freepbx/freepbx-14.0-latest.tgz tar xfz freepbx-14.0-latest.tgz rm -f freepbx-14.0-latest.tgz cd freepbx

Use the FPBX script to start asterisk:
./start_asterisk start

Run the installer:
./install -n

That should do it! We can complete the setup by accessing the UI through the web browser. Don’t forget to disable firewalld if you need to gain temporary access and have not set your rules – systemctl stop firewalld

Now switch to your browser and navigate to your boxes IP.

Configure admin user details and update settings;

Notifications: Used to send admin emails regarding updates available or that were auto installed, as well as if any modules have been modified. Modified files indicate an intruder may have gained access to your system and changed some FPBX config files.

Auto Updates: This has worked well in my experience but if you want to maintain control and test updates before deploying, disable auto-updates.

You will now be prompted to login with your new user;