FreeSWITCH 1.6 Quick Install Guide for Debian Jessie

Our Goal

There’s a lot of FreeSWITCH material out on the web.  Our goal is to provide you a concise document that provides the necessary steps or scripts to install the latest stable release of FreeSWITCH.

What is FreeSWITCH

FreeSWITCH is an OpenSource VoIP platform that enables you to build communication platforms that span from a simple PBX to a sophisticated backend communication framework that allows thousands of calls to interconnect per second.

Assumptions

  • Debian Jessie is installed
  • You have root or sudo access via the CLI

Let’s Install (with Explanation of each command)

  • Install Public Key: We need to install the FreeSWITCH public key so that we validate the packages that we are going to install came from FreeSWITCH.org and was not tampered with.
    wget -O - https://files.freeswitch.org/repo/deb/debian/freeswitch_archive_g0.pub | apt-key add -
    
  • Setup Repository: Setup the Debian repository file with the necessary configuration to download the FreeSWITCH packages
    echo "deb http://files.freeswitch.org/repo/deb/freeswitch-1.6/ jessie main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/freeswitch.list 
    
  • Install the Packages: We will first update our local repository using apt-get update, which will obtain the metadata of the FreeSWITCH packages since we just added the FreeSWITCH repository. It will also update the metadata for other repositories as well. Lastly, we will install FreeSWITCH using the apt-get install -y freeswitch-meta-all command
    apt-get update && apt-get install -y freeswitch-meta-all
    
  • Secure the Extensions: By default all of the extensions have a password of 1234. FreeSWITCH will warn you that all extensions are using a default password of 1234 and ask that you change it by putting an entry in the /var/log/freeswitch/freeswitch.log file. Also, it will delay any outbound calls for a few seconds. You can change the default password by running these commands.
    sed -i "s/1234/10082013/" /etc/freeswitch/vars.xml
    fs_cli -x reloadxml
    

    Where the extension passwords will now be 10082013. You can change the default password by just replacing 10082013 with your password.

Register SIP Phones

Now we can validate that the install was successful. We can do this by registering 1 or more SIP phones. The default install of FreeSWITCH comes with a set of users. Let’s register extension 1000 and 1001 with two separate VoIP phones and make calls between the sip phones. Remember that your password for each extension is 10082013 or whatever you manually changed it too.