Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition

Chapter 17. Asterisk Manager Interface and Call Files

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 or 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. In fact, we find call files to be useful enough that we’re going to talk about them first.

Call Files

It is common to use AMI for originating calls, but in many situations it’s easier to use call files. A call file is a simple text file that describes the call that you would like Asterisk to originate. When a call file is placed into the /var/spool/asterisk/outgoing directory, Asterisk will immediately detect that a file has been placed there and process the call.

Asterisk comes with a sample call file, which you will find at ~/src/asterisk-15.<TAB>/sample.call ...