System information

Open the asterisk.conf file with an editor such as nano or vim: Uncomment the run
user and rungroup lines, and modify them so that they each contain asteriskpbx as the
assigned value. Open the /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf file with vim:
$ vim /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf
Then modify the file by uncommenting the two lines starting with runuser and run
group and modifying the value to asteriskpbx.
runuser=asteriskpbx
rungroup=asteriskpbx
We now have all the configuration files required to start a very minimal version of
Asterisk.
†
Give it a shot by starting Asterisk up in the foreground:
$ /usr/sbin/asterisk -cvvv
We are specifying the full path to the asterisk binary, but if you modify
your PATH system variable to include the /usr/sbin/ directory you don’t
need to specify the full path. See “Adding a system user” on page 39 for
information about modifying the $PATH environment variable.
Asterisk will start successfully without any errors or warnings (although it does warn
you that some files are missing), and present to you the Asterisk command-line interface
(CLI). At this point there are no modules, minimal core functionality, and no channel
modules with which to communicate, but Asterisk is up and running.
Executing the module show command at the Asterisk CLI shows that there are no ex-
ternal modules loaded:
*CLI> module show
Module Description Use Count
0 modules loaded
We’ve done this simply to demonstrate that Asterisk can be run in a very minimal state,
and doesn’t require the dozens of modules that a default install will enable. Let’s stop
Asterisk with the core stop now CLI command:
*CLI> core stop now
† So minimal, in fact, that it’s completely useless at this point. But we digress.
54 | Chapter 3: Installing Asterisk