In this chapter we’re going to walk through the installation of Asterisk from the source code. Many people shy away from this method, claiming that it is too difficult and time-consuming. Our goal here is to demonstrate that installing Asterisk from source is not actually that difficult to do. More importantly, we want to provide you with the best Asterisk platform on which to learn.

In this book we will be helping you build a functioning Asterisk system from scratch. In this chapter you will build a base platform for your Asterisk system. Given that we are installing from source, there is potentially a lot of variation in how you can do this. The process we discuss here is one that we’ve used for many years, and following it will provide you with a suitable foundation for Asterisk.

As part of this process we will also explain installation of some of the software dependencies on the Linux platform that will be needed for topics covered later in this book (such as database integration). We will show instructions for installing Asterisk on both CentOS (a Red Hat–based distribution) and Ubuntu (a Debian-based distribution), which we believe covers the vast majority of Linux distributions being installed today. We’ll try to keep the instructions general enough that they should be useful on any distribution of your choice.^[17]

We have chosen to install on CentOS and Ubuntu because they are the most popular options, but Asterisk is generally distribution-agnostic. Asterisk will even install on Solaris, BSD, or OS X^[18] if you like. We won’t be covering them in this book, though, as Asterisk is most heavily developed on the Linux platform.

Some commands you see in this chapter will be split into separate rows, each labeled for the distribution on which the command should be performed. Commands for which distributions are not specified are for common commands that can be run on both distributions.