How to Install Asterisk 18 and FreePBX 15 on Ubuntu (Raspberry Pi 4)

Running a full-featured IP-PBX telephony server on a Raspberry Pi 4 provides small offices and lab environments with an enterprise telephone system at negligible power consumption. This comprehensive guide covers compiling Asterisk 18 LTS with DAHDI/libpri and configuring the FreePBX 15 web administration portal on Ubuntu Server (ARM64).

Hardware: Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB / 8GB recommended) • OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS aarch64 • Stack: Asterisk 18 LTS, FreePBX 15, MariaDB, Node.js

1. Installing Build Prerequisites and MariaDB

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential linux-headers-generic libssl-dev libncurses5-dev   libnewt-dev libxml2-dev linux-headers-$(uname -r) libsqlite3-dev uuid-dev   mariadb-server mariadb-client libjansson-dev libedit-dev sox libsox-fmt-all

# Configure database
sudo mysql_secure_installation

2. Compiling Asterisk 18 LTS

cd /usr/src
sudo wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-18-current.tar.gz
sudo tar -zxf asterisk-18-current.tar.gz
cd asterisk-18.*

sudo contrib/scripts/get_mp3_source.sh
sudo contrib/scripts/install_prereq install

sudo ./configure --with-pjproject-bundled --with-jansson-bundled
sudo make menuselect.makeopts
sudo menuselect/menuselect --enable format_mp3 menuselect.makeopts
sudo make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install
sudo make samples
sudo make config
sudo ldconfig

3. Installing FreePBX 15

Install Node.js, Apache, PHP modules, and run the FreePBX install script pointing to Asterisk:

cd /usr/src
sudo wget http://mirror.freepbx.org/modules/packages/freepbx/freepbx-15.0-latest.tgz
sudo tar -zxf freepbx-15.0-latest.tgz
cd freepbx
sudo ./install -n