FreeSWITCH 1.2: Whether you're an IT pro or an enthusiast, setting up your own fully-featured telephony system is an exciting challenge, made all the more realistic for beginners by this brilliant book on FreeSWITCH. A 100% practical tutorial. , Second Edition

FreeSWITCH, like many other software applications, requires a suitable environment. Primarily that means choosing an appropriate operating system for your hardware and having the proper LAN/WAN connectivity and physical environment.

Each operating system has its own set of prerequisites. Make sure that you have met the prerequisites for your platform. In the following sections we discuss Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Working with FreeSWITCH requires you to have a text editor with which you are comfortable. Regardless of your editor choice, we strongly recommend that you use a text editor that supports XML syntax highlighting. You will find that editing XML configuration files is much easier on the eyes with highlighting turned on.

If you do not already have a preferred editor, we suggest trying one or two for your platform. Be aware that if you are in a Linux/Unix environment that does not have a Graphical User Interface (GUI), your choices will be fewer. However, there are several excellent text-only editors available:

Most open source projects have their source code divided into two general categories: stable and latest. The FreeSWITCH project recently formed these two branches. Version 1.2.x is the stable branch and Version 1.3.x is the latest branch. Future releases will follow the even/odd numbering plan, where 1.4.x is stable and 1.5.x is the unstable or development branch. You can update to the latest branch at any time if you are using Git (see the Building from the latest code section in this chapter) One other point to keep in mind: binary distributions of FreeSWITCH might be available for your platform. While they are certainly convenient, in our experience it is easier to troubleshoot, update, and customize your FreeSWITCH installation when compiling from the source.

Be sure that your system has the Internet access because the build process will occasionally need to download additional files.

The source code can be obtained from the following FreeSWITCH download site:

http...

If you prefer to be on the latest version of FreeSWITCH, you will need a Git client. Use yum, apt, or whichever package manager your distribution has to install Git. In Windows, a popular (and free) client is TortoiseGit (code.google.com/p/tortoisegit).

In Linux/Unix environments a typical Git checkout and compile session would look like this:

#>cd /usr/src
#>git clone git://git.freeswitch.org/freeswitch.git
#>cd freeswitch
#>./bootstrap.sh
#>./configure -C
#>make install
#>make cd-sounds-install
#>make cd-moh-install

The preceding commands will take some time to complete. You can automate the process a bit by chaining the commands together with the && operator. These commands are discussed in more detail in the following sections.

The install procedure is essentially the same for Linux, Unix, or Mac OS X. However, make sure that your system has met the prerequisites listed in the previous section.

As mentioned in the Operating system prerequisites section, FreeSWITCH is built with MSVC or MSVCEE. The steps presented here are specifically for MSVCEE 2010; however, the steps for the various editions of MSVC are essentially the same.

Once you have compiled and installed FreeSWITCH, it is time to launch the application:

The system will start loading, and numerous messages will display on the screen. Console messages are color-coded for readability. Do not worry about all of the messages right now, just make sure that your system starts up and you get to the FreeSWITCH console, which we call the command-line interface (CLI). The CLI prompt looks like the following:

freeswitch@localhost>

Let's issue a few commands to verify that the system is operational. First, issue the version command to verify the version of FreeSWITCH that we have installed. You'll see something similar to this:

FreeSWITCH Version 1.2.1

Next, issue the status command, which displays a few statistics about your system. You'll see output similar to this:

freeswitch@localhost> status
UP 0 years, 0 days, 0 hours...

In most cases, you will want FreeSWITCH to run in the background. In a Unix/Linux environment this is frequently called running as a daemon. In Windows this is called running as a service.

To launch FreeSWITCH as a daemon in Unix/Linux, execute the following command:

#>/usr/local/freeswitch/bin/freeswitch –nc

The various Linux and Unix distributions take different approaches to automatically running a daemon at system start up. Several initialization or init script examples are available on the FreeSWITCH wiki: wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Freeswitch_init. Consult the system administration documentation for your specific distribution for instructions on how to configure the init script to launch FreeSWITCH at system start up.

Windows requires just a few steps to have FreeSWITCH run as a service. They are as follows:

In this chapter, we accomplished a number of objectives. They are as follows:

In the following chapter, we will put our new installation into action as we explore the demonstration configuration of FreeSWITCH.