Asterisk 1.4 includes an HTML Asterisk GUI (well, it’s more of a package for the creation of GUIs) by Digium. Installing it is quite easy once you have installed Asterisk 1.4 itself - see node Compiling Asterisk 1.4 beta.

The GUI is a nice AJAX app that will run through the Asterisk embedded web server with a recent web browser.

The first thing you’ll have to do is to download the GUI, currently through Subversion only:

svn checkout http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk-gui/trunk asterisk-gui

don’t worry if it takes a while to get this started, just let it run until the package is downloaded.

cd asterisk-gui/
make
make install
make samples

Before the package can start, you’ll have to change a few things in your Asterisk:

  • Enabling the embedded HTTP manager and webserver Edit /etc/asterisk/http.conf and change the following lines:

    enabled=yes enablestatic=yes bindaddr=0.0.0.0

This enables the HTTP server, enables it to serve static content (the GUI itself) and binds to the standard address, so that any browser from a remote machine can access it.

  • Configuring the manager access Edit /etc/asterisk/manager.conf and change the following lines:

    enabled = yes webenabled = yes

Then add a new section at the end of the file

[admin]
secret = test
read = system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user,config
write = system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user,config

This will allow a user called admin to connect with the password test and do nearly everything on the system.

Now restart Asterisk.

Do one last pre-flight test with the command

make checkconfig

If everything goes well, connect with a recent browser to:

http://10.10.3.103:8088/asterisk/static/config/cfgbasic.html

Where 10.10.3.103 is the address of your Asterisk system, and login as admin password test. You did it! The Asterisk GUI is now correctly configured.