How To Install Asterisk on CentOS 8

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Asterisk on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Asterisk is an open-source PBX software. It is used to manage SIP sessions between endpoints. Asterisk is a very powerful server that can be used to implement PBX, IVRs, VoIP gateways, and many more features. It supports many VoIP protocols such as SIP(Session Initiation Protocol) and MGCP(Media Gateway Control Protocol. It also supports many hardware devices such as analog cards, PRI cards, etc.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Asterisk on a CentOS 8.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 8.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Asterisk on CentOS 8

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install epel-release
sudo dnf config-manager –set-enabled PowerTools

Step 2. Disable SELinux on the CentOS system.

Set SELinux in Permissive mode by running the commands below:

sudo setenforce 0
sudo sed -i 's/\(^SELINUX=\).*/\SELINUX=permissive/' /etc/selinux/config

Step 3. Installing Dependencies.

Install all required packages on your Asterisk with the following commands:

sudo dnf group install "Development Tools"
sudo dnf install git wget vim net-tools sqlite-devel psmisc ncurses-devel libtermcap-devel newt-devel libxml2-devel libtiff-devel gtk2-devel libtool libuuid-devel subversion kernel-devel kernel-devel-$(uname -r) crontabs cronie-anacron libedit libedit-devel

Step 4. Installing Asterisk on CentOS 8.

Let’s download the latest Asterisk 18 source on our Centos 8 from the official website:

wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-18-current.tar.gz
tar xvfz asterisk-18-current.tar.gz
cd asterisk-18*/

Now run the configuration script using the following command:

./configure --with-jansson-bundled

Next, use the following command to open the asterisk configuration menu:

make menuselect

After that, start the compilation process using the make command:

make && make all && make install

Once done, run the make samples command to install the Asterisk sample configuration files:

make samples
make config
ldconfig

Now we will start the asterisk service and enable it so that it will run with every system reboot:

systemctl start asterisk
systemctl enable asterisk

Test with asterisk command to confirm Asterisk CLI is working:

asterisk -rvvv

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Asterisk. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Asterisk on your CentOS 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Asterisk website.