Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 4th 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 as enabling requests for Asterisk to perform some action. The available actions 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 use the AMI as their primary interface to Asterisk.

This chapter also includes documentation on the use of call files. Asterisk’s call files are an easy way to originate a few calls. Once call origination volume increases or your needs become otherwise more complex, you can move on to using the AMI. Details can be found in Call Files.

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
read=all     ; Receive all types of events
write=all    ; Allow this user to execute all actions

Note

This sample configuration is set up to allow only ...