Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition

Using Realtime

The Asterisk Realtime Architecture (ARA) is a method of storing the configuration files (that would normally be found in /etc/asterisk) and their configuration options in a database table. There are two types of realtime; static and dynamic. The static version is similar to the traditional method of reading a configuration file, except that the data is read from the database instead. The dynamic realtime method is used for things such as user and peer objects (SIP, IAX2), and voicemail which loads and updates the information as it is required. Changes to static information requires a reload just as if you had changed the text file on the system, but dynamic information is polled by Asterisk as needed and requires no reload. Realtime is configured in the extconfig.conf file located in the /etc/asterisk directory. This file tells Asterisk what to load from the database and where to load it from, allowing certain files to be loaded from the database and other files to be loaded from the standard configuration files.

Static Realtime

Static realtime is used when you want to store the configuration that you would normally place in the configuration files in /etc/asterisk but want to load from a database. The same rules that apply to flat files on your system still apply when using static realtime, such as requiring you to either run the reload command from the Asterisk CLI, or to reload the module associated with the configuration file (i.e., module reload chan_sip.so).