Asterisk Cookbook

Preface

This is a book for anyone who uses Asterisk, but particularly those who already understand the dialplan syntax.

In this book, we look at common problems we’ve encountered as Asterisk administrators and implementers, then show solutions to those problems using the Asterisk dialplan. As you go through the recipes and start looking at the solutions, you may think, “Oh, that’s a neat idea, but they could have also done it this way.” That might happen a lot, because with Asterisk, the number of solutions available for a particular problem are astounding. We have chosen to focus on using the tools available to us within Asterisk, so solutions heavily focus on the use of dialplan, but that doesn’t mean an external application through the Asterisk Gateway Interface or Asterisk Manager Interface isn’t also possible.

Readers of this book should be familiar with many core concepts of Asterisk, which is why we recommend that you already be familiar with the content of Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, also published by O’Reilly. This book is designed to be a complement to it.

We hope you find some interesting solutions in this book that help you to be creative in future problem solving.

Organization

The book is organized into these chapters:

Chapter 1, Dialplan Fundamentals

This chapter shows some examples of fundamental dialplan constructs that will be useful over and over again.

Chapter 2, Call Control

This chapter discusses a number of examples of controlling phone calls in Asterisk.

Chapter 3, ...