Start Asterisk as service

After going through the Asterisk installation steps, we usually want to start it as a service.

 

Usual steps of Asterisk Installation

./configure   -- check if our system is suitable for Asterisk installation

make menuselect  -- it is an optional step, allowing you to select additional module, eg, mysql_cdr

make – the compilation process

make install – setup the paths, copy files to asterisk directory, etc.

make samples – an optional step to put a set of sample config in your installation (it will over-write existing config)

make progdocs – also an optional step to setup the documentation

 

At this stage, you should be able to run Asterisk as 'asterisk –cvvvvvv' in foreground.  But it is more desirable to setup a service and it can be achieved easily by:

 

Setup Asterisk Service

make config

 

There is a set of platform-specific templates in <asterisk-src-dir>/contrib/init.d, designed to be used for service startup script.  The 'make config' will base on one of these templates to create the Asterisk startup script in /etc/init.d.  To verify the result:

 

#chkconfig –list asterisk

#asterisk        0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

 

Then, you can start asterisk by 'service asterisk start'.