How To Install Asterisk on Debian 11

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Asterisk on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Asterisk is an open-source framework used for building communications applications including VoIP gateways, and conference servers. Asterisk uses a VoIP protocol that allows you to make a call using the TCP/IP without any cost. Asterisk also supports all currently used protocols such as SIP, IAX2, GSM, G.711, or ISDN.

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 VoIP Server on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 11 (Bullseye).
• 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 Debian 11 Bullseye

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install software-properties-common curl

Step 2. Installing Asterisk on Debian 11.

By default, Asterisk is available on Debian 11 official repository. Now we run the following command below to install Asterisk to your Debian system:

sudo apt install asterisk asterisk-dahdi

After installation is complete we need to start the Asterisk server to start operating. We do that with the following command below:

sudo systemctl start asterisk
sudo systemctl enable asterisk
sudo systemctl status asterisk

Step 3. Verify Asterisk VoIP server.

Let us check the Asterisk version with this command:

asterisk -V

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Asterisk. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of the Asterisk VoIP server on Debian 11 Bullseye. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Asterisk website.