Asterisk is an open source software for creating and managing telephone PBX also voice and video communication platforms.
Thanks to its flexibility and ability to adapt to various needs, Asterisk is a popular tool for creating custom telecommunications and call center systems. It can be used both in small companies and in large enterprises that need advanced telecommunications solutions.
Moreover, this free Internet telephony system can be installed on a free Linux distribution: Rocky 9. The Rocky 9 distribution does not currently work with Oracle VM VirtualBox, so if you are considering a virtualization environment, choose Hyper-V or Proxmox. See our post about installing Rocky 9 on Proxmox. If you prefer a different Linux distribution, you can also see our articles about installing Asterisk on Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS 7 and CentOS Stream 8. Click on one of these links to see how to install asterisk on other Linux systems
Table of Contents
Hint
Instead of following all the instructions below, you can also use our installer file which installs Asterisk 20 from source.1) Prerequisites
Make sure you run all commands as ‘
root‘. Run ‘su‘ and enter your root password.
su
Update your system and install the required dependencies. At the same time, install a convenient text editor, for example Nano, and the wget and tar applications to download and unpack the installer. If we are used to the yum installer, here we will use the DNF package manager, which is its newer equivalent.
dnf -y update
dnf -y install nano wget tar epel-release chkconfig libedit-devel
2) Disable SELinux
First, be sure to disable the Linux kernel security module – SELinux. If you don’t do it now, you will encounter problems later, e.g. with playing recordings.
The sestatus command will show the current SELinux status:
sestatus
To disable SELinux, make changes to the
/etc/selinux/config file
nano /etc/selinux/config
Change the action policy from enforcing to disabled
SELINUX=disabled
Hint
Instead of editing the/etc/selinux/config file, you can simply enter the command:
sed -i s/SELINUX=enforcing/SELINUX=disabled/g /etc/selinux/config
3) System restart
Only restarting the system is the way to permanently disable SELinux.
reboot
Hint
You can also hold off on restarting and temporarily disable SELinux with the command:
setenforce 0
After reboot, the ‘sestatus’ command should show that SELinux is disabled
sestatus
4) Configuring software dependencies
First, download the Asterisk sources. The/usr/src directory is a convenient place to store all your installations.
wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-20-current.tar.gz
tar zxvf asterisk-20-current.tar.gz
rm -rf asterisk-20-current.tar.gz
cd asterisk-20*/
Before continuing with the installation, we need to add all the dependencies from the previously loaded repositories.
contrib/scripts/install_prereq install
Finally, we can configure our asterisk for the final build.
Rocky 9 requires a 64-bit system, so we add the --libdir=/usr/lib64 option to configure the command.
Due to the fact that chan_pjsip requires some additional libraries, we add two more options --with-jansson-bundled --with-pjproject-bundled
Our configurator command will follow:
./configure --libdir=/usr/lib64 --with-pjproject-bundled --with-jansson-bundled
After successfully completing the software configuration, we will see the asterisk system logo.
5) Compilation and installation
Now we can simply executemake command without parameters and compile the software. Of course, it is better to be able to choose additional options, functions, applications, codecs, so I suggest using make menuselect. It will display a menu where you can simply select what you need.
make menuselect
During the process, you can check or uncheck selected options, e.g. use ODBC instead of FILE storage for voicemail.
Sometimes the system will not allow you to select certain modules, but it also shows which dependencies are required.
Once you have selected the appropriate options, remember to select the
Save & Exit exiting the configurator.
Please note that some options may not be available. If you would like to use the
chan_mobile module to connect to Asterisk via bluetooth, you must first install bluetooth support in rocky 9 and then return to this configurator. Otherwise you will see an image similar to the one below. 
I encourage you to take a look at our post:
We explain there how to connect to Raspberry Pi via Bluetooth using the chan_mobile module
Connect your phone to RasPBX via Bluetooth (with chan_mobile)
We explain there how to connect to Raspberry Pi via Bluetooth using the chan_mobile module
After selecting the appropriate options and dependencies, execute the
make command itself and prepare for the actual installation. This and the next process may take several minutes.
make
The system will tell you what to do next. Executing make install will finally install Asterisk on your server.
make install
After successful installation, we will receive a window with information similar to the one below. Let’s start by making sample files with
make samples. This will create all documentation files.
make samples
Move the sample files to a new folder (e.g.
/etc/asterisk/samples/) and create a basic configuration with make basic-pbx.
mkdir /etc/asterisk/samples
mv /etc/asterisk/*.* /etc/asterisk/samples/
make basic-pbx
Asterisk is ready now (there is no information about it on the main screen). Unfortunately, there are no startup files yet. On CentoOS you can do make config, but Rocky 9 doesn’t understand it. We need to use systemd to manage the asterisk service. To do this, we will create the asterisk.service file and enter the necessary information into it.
touch /usr/lib/systemd/system/asterisk.service
cat <<'EOF' >/usr/lib/systemd/system/asterisk.service
[Unit]
Description=Asterisk PBX and telephony daemon.
#After=network.target
#include these if asterisk need to bind to a specific IP (other than 0.0.0.0)
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target network.target
[Service]
Type=simple
Environment=HOME=/var/lib/asterisk
WorkingDirectory=/var/lib/asterisk
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/asterisk -mqf -C /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf
ExecReload=/usr/sbin/asterisk -rx 'core reload'
ExecStop=/usr/sbin/asterisk -rx 'core stop now'
LimitCORE=infinity
Restart=always
RestartSec=4
# Prevent duplication of logs with color codes to /var/log/messages
StandardOutput=null
PrivateTmp=true
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF
I encourage you to check out our post:
We explain in detail how to use service management using
Customize your Asterisk systemd service in CentOS
We explain in detail how to use service management using
systemd and what its benefits are 6) Starting Asterisk
Now you can add the asterisk service to the startup, start it and check its status.
systemctl enable asterisk.service
systemctl start asterisk
systemctl status asterisk
If you see
asterisk (pid XXXX) is running… then you have just started Asterisk! 
If, out of habit, you executed the
make config command and try to start the asterisk service, you will unfortunately receive an error:
Failed to start asterisk.service: Unit asterisk.service not found.
If you first try to add the Asterisk service to autostart and then want to run it, you will also get errors like:
Job for asterisk.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
Trying to invoke the asterisk console itself will also fail:
Unable to connect to remote asterisk (does /var/run/asterisk/asterisk.ct/ exist?)
Restarting the operating system will not be a universal cure this time. Checking the status of our service will show its unavailability 
This is because Rocky 9 does not create startup files using
make config. You should use systemd described in point 5 of this post
However, first remove the incorrectly created connections.
systemctl disable asterisk.service
To verify that asterisk is installed correctly and has the appropriate libraries associated with it, run the following command:
ldd /usr/sbin/asterisk
You will see a list similar to the following:
As we mentioned earlier, we recommend visiting this post to create your own startup file .
After the asterisk service has been started successfully, you can still go to the
/etc/asterisk directory and view all the sample files.
cd /etc/asterisk
ls
Then you can run the PBX with the
asterisk -r command and start working.
asterisk -r
Congratulations!
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