6. Asterisk Extension Language
As of version 1.4, Asterisk offers two ways of composing the dialplan: the traditional extensions.conf
format, and the newer AEL, or Asterisk Extension Language, which uses the filename extensions.ael
.
AEL will be of particular interest to those Asterisk users who find large extensions.conf
files difficult to read. AEL looks more like a real scripting language. They are not mutually exclusive, either. It’s possible to use both, defining contexts in one or the other file. If both files are present, extensions.conf
will just overwrite identical portions of extensions.ael
when the dialplan is loaded.
Asterisk comes packaged with a command-line utility for converting AEL files into the traditional extensions.conf
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