Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition

Directories Used by Asterisk

Asterisk uses several directories on a Linux system to manage the various aspects of the system, such as voicemail recordings, voice prompts, and configuration files. This section discusses the necessary directories, all of which are created during installation and configured in the asterisk.conf file.

/etc/asterisk/

The /etc/asterisk/ directory contains the Asterisk configuration files. One file, however—zaptel.conf—is located in the /etc/ directory. The Zaptel hardware was originally designed by Jim Dixon of the Zapata Telephony Group as a way of bringing reasonable and affordable computer telephony equipment to the world. Asterisk makes use of this hardware, but any other software can also make use of the Zaptel hardware and drivers. Consequently, the zaptel.conf configuration file is not directly located in the /etc/asterisk/ directory.

/usr/lib/asterisk/modules/

The /usr/lib/asterisk/modules/ directory contains all of the Asterisk loadable modules. Within this directory are the various applications, codecs, formats, and channels used by Asterisk. By default, Asterisk loads all of these modules at startup. You can disable any modules you are not using in the modules.conf file, but be aware that certain modules are required by Asterisk or are dependencies of other modules. Attempting to load Asterisk without these modules will cause an error at startup.

/var/lib/asterisk

The /var/lib/asterisk/ directory contains the astdb file and a number of subdirectories. ...