The dialplan is the heart of Asterisk. All channels that arrive in the system will be passed through the dialplan, which contains the call-flow script that determines how the incoming calls are handled.

A dialplan can be written in one of three ways:

Later in this book, we’ll have devoted several chapters to the subject of how to write a dialplan using traditional dialplan syntax (by far the most popular choice). Once you learn this language, it should be fairly easy to transition to AEL or LUA, should you desire.