How to Install Asterisk 16 LTS on CentOS 7 / RHEL 7 / Fedora

January 12, 2023
Asterisk/Vicidial

Installing Asterisk 16 Long-Term-Support on CentOS 7 / RHEL 7 / Fedora systems is a relatively straightforward process once the needed software and components are acquired. This article will guide you through the process of getting up and running with Asterisk 16.

How to Install Asterisk 16 LTS on CentOS 7. Welcome to our guide on how to Install Asterisk 16 LTS on CentOS 7 / RHEL 7 / Fedora. Asterisk is a powerful Open Source PBX system with Enterprise features only available in commercially available PBX systems. Asterisk uses commodity Ethernet hardware and allows for the integration of physically separate installations.

Features of Asterisk PBX system

Conference calling
Call Recording
Call Monitoring
Distributed Universal Number Discovery
Caller ID on Call Waiting
Direct Inward System Access
Call Parking
SMS Messaging
Trunking
Transcoding
Voicemail
Call Queues and many other features.

In our recent guide, we covered the Installation of Asterisk with FreePBX on Debian server. If you need a commercial system there is 3CX which has a guide for the installation on our blog.

Install Asterisk 16 on CentOS 7 / RHEL 7 / Fedora

Before you start executing Asterisk install commands on your CentOS 7 / Fedora server, make sure all the package son the system are up to date.

sudo yum -y update

Set hostname type:

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname pbx.example.com

When done, add the epel repository – CentOS only

sudo yum -y install epel-release

Set SELinux in Permissive Mode by running the commands below:

sudo setenforce 0

sudo sed -i ‘s/(^SELINUX=).*/SELINUX=permissive/’ /etc/selinux/config

Then follow the steps below to install and configure Asterisk on your CentOS 7 / RHEL 7 / Fedora server.

Time needed: 15 minutes.

Install Asterisk 16 on CentOS 7 / RHEL 7 / Fedora

Step 1: Install Asterisk 16 PBX dependencies
The initial step when setting up Asterisk is to install all required dependencies.
sudo yum -y install wget vim net-tools openssl-devel

You also need to install Development Tools group packages.
sudo yum -y groupinstall u0022Development Toolsu0022

The other packages that you need to install are:
sudo yum -y install libedit-devel sqlite-devel psmisc ncurses-devel libtermcap-devel sox newt-devel libxml2-devel libtiff-devel audiofile-devel gtk2-devel uuid-devel libtool libuuid-devel subversion git subversion kernel-devel crontabs cronie cronie-anacron wget vim autoconf
Step 2: Download and Install Jansson
Jansson is a C library for encoding, decoding and manipulating JSON data. Download and install it on CentOS 7 server by running the commands below:

sudo su –
cd /usr/src/
git clone https://github.com/akheron/jansson.git
cd jansson
autoreconf -i
./configure u002du002dprefix=/usr/
make u0026u0026 make install
Step 3: Download and Install Asterisk
Now that we have all dependency packages installed, we should be ready to download and install Asterisk on CentOS 7 / RHEL 7.

cd /usr/src/
wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-16-current.tar.gz
tar xvfz asterisk-16-current.tar.gz
rm -f asterisk-16-current.tar.gz
cd asterisk-16*/
./configure u002du002dlibdir=/usr/lib64

If all goes well, you should get output similar to below:
Step 5: Set Asterisk menu options
Setup menu options by running the following command:

make menuselect
Use arrow keys to navigate, and Enter key to select.

On Add-ons select chan_ooh323 and format_mp3 as shown below

On Core Sound Packages, select the formats of Audio packets like below

For Music On Hold, select the following minimal modules

On Extra Sound Packages select as shown below:

Enable app_macro under Applications section.

You can change other configurations you see fit. When done, save and exit
Now run the following command to download the mp3 decoder library into the source tree.

sudo contrib/scripts/get_mp3_source.sh

Install other dependencies:
sudo ./contrib/scripts/install_prereq install

To start building and installation of Asterisk with selected modules, run the commands.

make
make install
make samples
make config
ldconfig

Sample output:

A systemd asterisk unit file will be created for you.

Create a separate user and group to run asterisk services, and assign correct permissions:

groupadd asterisk

useradd -r -d /var/lib/asterisk -g asterisk asterisk

usermod -aG audio,dialout asterisk

chown -R asterisk.asterisk /etc/asterisk

chown -R asterisk.asterisk /var/{lib,log,spool}/asterisk

chown -R asterisk.asterisk /usr/lib64/asterisk

Set Asterisk default user to asterisk:

$ sudo vim /etc/sysconfig/asterisk

AST_USER=”asterisk”

AST_GROUP=”asterisk”

$ sudo vim /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf

runuser = asterisk ; The user to run as.

rungroup = asterisk ; The group to run as.

Restart asterisk service after making the changes

sudo systemctl restart asterisk

Enable service to start on boot:

sudo systemctl enable asterisk

Test to see if you can connect to Asterisk CLI:

# asterisk -rvv

Created by Mark Spencer <[email protected]>

Asterisk comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; type ‘core show warranty’ for details.

This is free software, with components licensed under the GNU General Public

License version 2 and other licenses; you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type ‘core show license’ for details. =========================================================================

Running as user ‘asterisk’

Running under group ‘asterisk’

Connected to Asterisk 16.25.1 currently running on centos (pid = 17452)

centos*CLI> exit

Asterisk cleanly ending (0).

Executing last minute cleanups

You can confirm that Asterisk service is running as user asterisk. This is a recommended setting for Production.

Conclusion

You now have a running Asterisk 16 on CentOS 7 / RHEL 7 server. In our next how-to guide, we will cover the installation and Configuration of FreePBX on CentOS 7. Stay tuned and drop a comment if you encounter any issue with the setup.

Zia Hassan

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