Asterisk dialplan tutorial

Learn how to create the Asterisk dial plan

On this page you will find the series of video tutorials and real-world dial plan examples that will help you to learn the basic concepts of Asterisk dial plan development and show you the easiest and fastest way to build Asterisk dial plan using Visual Dialplan development environment for Asterisk.

Lesson 1 – Basic dial plan elements and your first dial plan: “Hello world” dial plan

The dial plan is truly the heart of any Asterisk system. It defines how Asterisk handles inbound and outbound calls. Everything from voicemail, to conferencing, to voice menus is done through the dial plan. In a nutshell, it consists of a list of instructions or steps that Asterisk will follow. The Asterisk dial plan is specified in the configuration file named extensions dot conf. We’ll start with a very simple example. We are going to instruct Asterisk to answer a call, play a sound file, and then hang up. First we will start Visual Dial plan and create new context named Inbound….

Lesson 2 – Simple Voice Menu, Special extensions, Dial block and Voicemail

In this lesson we will modify the “Hello world” dial plan by adding more extensions, then we’ll add the “dial” building block to call specified number, and last we’ll add a voice mail.

About Visual Dialplan

Visual Dialplan for Asterisk® is modern rapid application development platform for Asterisk dial plan development.

It comes with drag-and-drop visual modeling environment and large component library, handy dial plan samples, powerful validation engine, and single button deployment functionality. It even learns about Asterisk server configuration – Asterisk server configuration reading module connects to the Asterisk server, pools the server configuration data and then pre-populates library components with configuration objects. Visual Dialplan detects remote Asterisk server version and accommodates its behavior accordingly. And there are other cool features like export graphical presentation of the dial plan to image file etc.

Visual Dialplan is the only Asterisk GUI that provides full access to Asterisk dial plan potential.

About Visual Dialplan Code Zone

Visual Dialplan Code Zone is a website for developers to find solutions, share ideas and solve problems.
It includes a wiki containing tutorials, code snippets, dial plan examples and tools to simplify development and testing.