Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Chapter 20. Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI)

John Malkovich: I have seen a world that NO man should see!

Craig Schwartz: Really? Because for most people it’s a rather enjoyable experience.

—Being John Malkovich

The Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) is a system monitoring and management interface provided by Asterisk. It allows live monitoring of events that occur in the system, as well enabling you to request that Asterisk perform some action. The actions that are available are wide-ranging and include things such as returning status information and originating new calls. Many interesting applications have been developed on top of Asterisk that take advantage of the AMI as their primary interface to Asterisk.

Quick Start

This section is for getting your hands dirty with the AMI as quickly as possible. First, put the following configuration in /etc/asterisk/manager.conf:

;
; Turn on the AMI and ask it to only accept connections from localhost.
;
[general]
enabled = yes
webenabled = yes
bindaddr = 127.0.0.1

;
; Create an account called "hello", with a password of "world"
;
[hello]
secret=world

Note

This sample configuration is set up to only allow local connections to the AMI. If you intend on making this interface available over a network, it is strongly recommended that you only do so using TLS. The use of TLS is discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

Once the AMI configuration is ready, enable the built-in HTTP server by putting the following contents in /etc/asterisk/http.conf ...