Asterisk MacOSX Support

NOTE: Astmasters.net is being migrated to Mactelephony.net – Links temporarily unavailable

News

05 Jul 2009 – Niek Vlessert released a precompiled Asterisk for your Mac OSX Leopard with a basic installation script. Get it: http://asterisk.vlessert.nl/

June 2007 – Mezzo.net has relatively recent asterisk precompiles packages and more….

Asterisk runs on various versions of MacOSX, starting with MacOSX “Jaguar” (ver 10.2), “Panther” (ver 10.3), and “Tiger” (ver 10.4.x). MacOSX, uses an open-source subsystem called Darwin which is based on FreeBSD and the Mach 3.0 microkernel. This means that BSD code can mostly be used without modification but drivers need to be specifically written for Darwin/MacOSX only.

NOTE: PCI CARD SUPPORT for MacOSX is not available. Use EXTERNAL GATEWAY DEVICES instead.

Getting Started

If you are new to Asterisk and VoIP and you don’t have the time or the nerve to concern yourself with building software from source code and editing configuration files, then a Mac running OSX is the best choice for you to get started. Installing Asterisk and setting up a basic home IP-PBX system on your Mac is as easy as anything else you do on your Mac, just as you would expect it to be. You don’t need a consultant to do it for you. You can do it yourself and you don’t need any prior knowledge to do so.

Here is all you need to do:

Download the Asterisk installation package for MacOSX and double click it to install Asterisk on your Mac

Note: link temporarily unavailable due to migration of astmasters.net to new mactelephony.net domain

Download the Asterisk Launcher for MacOSX so you can control your Asterisk server using only the MacOSX GUI interface
Download the Asterisk Assistants for MacOSX to easily configure your Asterisk server using only the MacOSX GUI interface
Make and receive phone calls via Asterisk and enjoy!

For more details with illustrations:

See this Guide to Getting Started with Asterisk on MacOSX

More GUI tools for further configuration tasks are under development. Check this Wiki page regularly for updates.

Installation

Installing a pre-built package

Most recent precompiled packages.

But notice that they install at a different location than the sunrise packages and as a result, most wizards will not work without tweaking. App_notify and bonjour support included.

Building from source using Fink

Asterisk has a number of dependencies that are not included in a normal Mac OS X install, even with all of the developer tools. You can get these dependencies from the Fink package management system. These dependencies include libgsm, libspeex, libvorbis, libusb, lua, libintl, popt, and maybe others. After you have installed Fink, then install these packages:

fink install popt gsm speex3 libgettext3-dev libusb

Get your asterisk however you want, svn, tarball, etc. and then run ./configure with some flags to tell it where to find the Fink stuff:

./configure –prefix=/usr/local CFLAGS=-I/sw/include LDFLAGS=-L/sw/lib –without-popt
make CFLAGS=-I/sw/include LDFLAGS=-L/sw/lib

Removal (Uninstall)

To remove an Asterisk installation download and run the asterisk_uninstall.sh script
Copy the script to your home folder, open Terminal.app and type: sudo ./uninstall_asterisk.sh help
Note: Read the documentation at the head of each script in the zip archive for further information

Default location of Asterisk

The default location of the Asterisk executable on Linux is /usr/sbin/asterisk. On BSD systems, user installed software is usually located in /usr/local/bin. However, for the sake of configuration compatibility with Linux, the MacOS X builds and installers use the Linux convention and place Asterisk in /usr/sbin/asterisk. Since Asterisk is a faceless Unix daemon will not show up in your /Applications folder and it will not be displayed in the dock.

NOTE: Asterisk Launcher and the Asterisk Assistants will only work if Asterisk has been installed in the default location /usr/sbin/asterisk. They will not work if Asterisk is installed in a different location. These utilities use the MacOS X security framework to call Asterisk and for security reasons, the path has been hardcoded so that it cannot be changed to another executable (potentially containing malicious code).

Starting and stopping Asterisk using the GUI

Use Asterisk Launcher to start and stop Asterisk and monitor its status. Asterisk Launcher also allows you to let Asterisk launch automatically at system startup. For an alternative autostart method (using launchd), see Building Asterisk on MacOSX.

Building Asterisk from source

If you want to build Asterisk yourself, you will need the developer tools for MaxOSX and the Asterisk source code, then follow the instructions at Building Asterisk on MacOSX.

Limitations

PCI based telephony interface cards, such as Digium‘s wildcard series, require drivers which are currently only available for GNU/Linux operating systems. The only way to connect a MacOSX based Asterisk server to conventional telephone lines and telephones is through external devices such as media gateways and ATAs. For example, to connect an analog telephone line, an FXO media gateway can be used and to connect an analog telephone, an analog telephone adapter (ATA) can be used. An example of a very affordable FXO gateway/ATA combo device often used with Asterisk is the Sipura 3000. The Sipura 3000 costs about 75 USD and is well suited for a home PBX setup.

How you can contribute

If you are a MacOSX developer and want to contribute to Asterisk visit #asterisk-dev on irc.freenode.net.

MacOS X How-to’s

Instructions for Building Asterisk on MacOSX yourself
Peter and Johnny Rukavinen have posted an article on how to dial out from MacOSX Addressbook via Asterisk
how to clean a mac and others how-to articles

MacOSX specific Asterisk utilities and add-ons

CallControl for Mac – Mac, Asterisk CTI solution with: click to dial from any application, Caller ID recognition using AddressBook and Growl and AppleScript support
Asterisk Assistants for GUI based configuration of Asterisk by Sunrise Telephone Systems Ltd.
Asterisk AppleScripts for basic control of Asterisk on MacOSX by Sunrise Telephone Systems Ltd.
Jon’s Phone Tool – a fully integrated desktop dialer for MacOSX with Asterisk support by Jon Nathan
STS Template Engine for Cocoa, generates Asterisk config files from templates, by Sunrise Telephone Systems Ltd.
Asterisk Caller Notification with Mac OS-X client. (AddressBook-Dialer included.)
configurable Asterisk Bonjour Support
Asterisk cmd swift for Mac OS-X and Linux
Asterisk FileMaker Plug-In for Mac OS-X.
Asterisk.framework for Cocoa Programming. (universal binary)
Asterisk CDR Inspector .app that displays CDRs in real time. BSD source, contributions welcome

MacOSX Softphones

Softphones which can be configured to connect to Asterisk

Cphone: H.323 – Download page
The iaxComm project on sourceforge: IAX – Download link
LoudHush, the only truly MacOSX native Softphone: IAX – Download link
X-Lite from Xten: SIP

Softphones which cannot be configured to connect to Asterisk

iChat AV from Apple: incompatible derivative of SIP – Website
SquidCam from SquidSoft: undocumented proprietary VoIP protocol – Website
Skype: closed and proprietary VoIP protocol, very restrictive EULA, client hijacks resources of your Mac for use by Skype network

If you happen to visit any of these non-standard softphone maker’s websites, you may want to drop them an email and ask them to consider to support IAX in future versions of their software. The open source iaxComm project has all the libraries they need to make it work and they’ll save themselves a lot of work maintaining their own protocols in the long term.