Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10. Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) and Adhearsion

Do but take care to express yourself in a plain, easy Manner, in well-chosen, significant and decent Terms, and to give a harmonious and pleasing Turn to your Periods: study to explain your Thoughts, and set them in the truest Light, labouring as much as possible, not to leave them dark nor intricate, but clear and intelligible.

—Miguel de Cervantes, Preface to Don Quixote

The Manager Interface

The Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) is a powerful programmatic interface. It allows external programs to both control and monitor an Asterisk system.^[125] This interface is often used to integrate Asterisk with existing business processes and systems, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. It can also be used for a wide variety of applications, such as automated dialers and click-to-call systems.

The Asterisk Manager Interface listens for connections on a network port. A client program can then connect to the Asterisk Manager Interface on that port, authenticate itself, and send commands to Asterisk. Asterisk will then respond to the request, as well as update the client program with the status of the system.

To use the Manager, you must define an account in the file /etc/asterisk/manager.conf. This file will look something like this:

[general] enabled = yes port = 5038 bindaddr = 0.0.0.0 [oreilly] secret = notvery ;deny=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 ;permit=209.16.236.73/255.255.255.0 read = system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user write ...