FreePBX RPMs

A brand-new FreePBX RPM is released in the Zultron repo. It was built from scratch, and improves over other FreePBX RPMs I am aware of:

• Contains latest versions of all modules
• RPM verifies, and uninstalls cleanly
• Init scripts for FOP server
• SRPM contains scripts to help automate updates when new modules come out

These may sound obvious, but other FreePBX RPMs I'm aware of that aren't part of an appliance simply install the distribution tarball in /usr/src, and require the user to complete all steps needed in the manual install process. Typical RPM tasks such as rpm -[VeU] are meaningless, and other bits of infrastructure are missing.

A look at this RPM's freepbx.spec file reveals some ugliness. The reason for this ugliness is that the RPM has to do all the file manipulation that the install_amp script does. The install_amp script mixes the file manipulation and the database manipulation together, and while it has a '--no-files' option for (mostly) DB-only manipulation, it doesn't have the complementary '--files-only' option. There are other complications too; for example, the script exits if asterisk is not running, and doesn't accept a $PREFIX for installation into an RPM build root. I hope that this RPM helps inspire some development toward adding these install parameters that would enable easy RPM (and other systems) packaging.

Installation

This RPM is meant to work with the Asterisk RPM from the Zultron repo; that RPM doesn't package most files in /etc/asterisk which would cause file conflicts with the FreePBX RPM, and it also packages the asterisk-extra-sounds-en-gsm sounds.

Basic steps to install (first install the EPEL and Zultron repos):

$ yum install freepbx asterisk
$ # (start your webserver as asterisk user with /usr/share/freepbx as webroot)
$ # (create the asterisk databases and user as in the installation guide)
$ cd /usr/lib/freepbx
$ mysql asterisk < SQL/newinstall.sql
$ mysql asteriskcdrdb < SQL/cdr_mysql_table.sql
$ ./install_amp --no-files
$ amportal chown
$ chkconfig fop-server on
$ service fop-server start
$ service asterisk restart
$ yum install freepbx-modules

Here is a detailed tutorial.