RasPBX Background

Installation of Asterisk and FreePBX GUI on Raspberry Pi

• "Asterisk" is a PBX communication server
• "FreePBX" is a front-end that exposes Asterisk functionality via a web-based GUI
• "FreePBX Distro" (previously called "AsteriskNow") was a pre-configured bundle distribution of Asterisk/FreePBX system based on CentOS. But now discontinued.
• "RaspPBX" is a pre-configured bundle distribution of Asterisk/FreePBX based on Raspbian Buster 10, Asterisk 16.13.0, and FreePBX 15.0.16.75. The latest version is from 2020-10-10, but is no longer supported.

So... this repository intends to document the process of creating an up-to-date Asterisk installation on a Raspberry Pi, based on latest releases as follows:

• Asterisk 22 (2025-01-09)
• FreePBX 17 (2024-08-02)
• Rasp Pi OS, Debian 12 Bookworm (2024-11-19)

This is based on snippets from various sources, primarily https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30661088-PBX-FreePBX-for-the-Raspberry-Pi .

1.) Install Raspberry Pi OS (20mins)

a.) Download the latest OS image from https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/ . I'm using 2024-11-19-raspios-bookworm-arm64-lite.img.xz b.) Burn the OS image onto an >8Gb SD card. I use DiskImager to do this (but you could alternatively use Etcher etc.)

2.) Configure OS in Windows (2mins)

a.) Once the OS image is burned, the SD card should automically be mounted in Windows Explorer as a partition named "bootfs" b.) Create an empty file in the bootfs root directory named "ssh" c.) Create a text file named "userconf" in the bootfs root directory containing the following:

pi:$6$c70VpvPsVNCG0YR5$l5vWWLsLko9Kj65gcQ8qvMkuOoRkEagI90qi3F/Y7rm8eNYZHW8CY6BOIKwMH7a3YYzZYL90zf304cAHLFaZE0

3.) Copy Installation script to Raspberry Pi

a.) Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi (connected to your LAN via ethernet cable) and power on b.) Use WinSCP to create an SFTP connection to:

host: raspberrypi.local
username: pi
password: raspberry