Introduction

FreeSWITCH is a software defined telecom stack that runs on any commodity hardware. FreeSWITCH can handle voice, video and text communication and support all popullar VoIP protocols. FreeSWITCH is flexible and modular, and can be used in any way you can imagine

This guide demonstrates how to get it install FreeSWITCH and get it up and running on a Ubuntu 20.04 LTS machine

Prerequisites

To follow along with this guide, you need one Ubuntu 20.04 LTS server which has prerequisite packages installed and configured. In order to install required packages issue following command

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
$ sudo apt install --yes build-essential pkg-config uuid-dev zlib1g-dev libjpeg-dev libsqlite3-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev \
            libpcre3-dev libspeexdsp-dev libldns-dev libedit-dev libtiff5-dev yasm libopus-dev libsndfile1-dev unzip \
            libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libavresample-dev liblua5.2-dev liblua5.2 cmake libpq-dev \
            unixodbc-dev autoconf automake ntpdate libxml2-dev libpq-dev libpq5 sngrep
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
$ sudo apt install --yes build-essential pkg-config uuid-dev zlib1g-dev libjpeg-dev libsqlite3-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev \
            libpcre3-dev libspeexdsp-dev libldns-dev libedit-dev libtiff5-dev yasm libopus-dev libsndfile1-dev unzip \
            libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libavresample-dev liblua5.2-dev liblua5.2-0 cmake libpq-dev \
            unixodbc-dev autoconf automake ntpdate libxml2-dev libpq-dev libpq5 sngrep

Starting from FreeSWITCH version 1.10.4 You have to Download, Compile and install sofia-sip and spandsp libraries separately

In order to install Sofia-Sip library, you need to download the latest code from FreeSWITCH’s official Packages repository

Installing Sofia-Sip library

Clone the official Sofia-Sip repository into /usr/local/src directory

$ sudo git clone https://github.com/freeswitch/sofia-sip /usr/local/src/sofia-sip

Now run following commands in sequence to install the library

$ cd /usr/local/src/sofia-ip
$ sudo ./bootstrap.sh 
$ sudo ./configure
$ sudo make && make install

To verify if Sofia-Sip library is installed correctly in your system, run following command

$ ldconfig -p | grep sofia

If libsofia-sip is not installed, there will be no output. If it is installed, you will get a line for each version available.

Installing SpanDSP library

Clone the SpanDSP repository from FreeSWITCH packages repository into /usr/local/src directory

$ sudo git clone https://github.com/freeswitch/spandsp /usr/local/src/spandsp

Now run following commands in sequence to install the library

$ cd /usr/local/src/spandsp
$ sudo ./bootstrap.sh 
$ sudo ./configure
$ sudo make && make install

To verify if SpanDSP library is installed correctly in your system, run following command

$ ldconfig -p | grep spandsp

If libspandsp is not installed, there will be no output. If it is installed, you will get a line for each version available.

You are now ready to install FreeSWITCH

Installing FreeSWITCH

Download the FreeSWITCH 1.10.5 release file into /usr/local/src directory

$ sudo wget -c https://files.freeswitch.org/releases/freeswitch/freeswitch-1.10.5.-release.tar.gz -P /usr/local/src

Extract the release file

$ cd /usr/local/src
$ sudo tar -zxvf freeswitch-1.10.5.-release.tar.gz
$ cd freeswitch-1.10.5.-release

Run the configure script

$ sudo ./configure

Note: FreeSWITCH uses SQLite by default for it’s core database although support for other database options Like PostgreSQL, ODBC exists. If you want to enable Postgres or ODBC support than you need to run the ./configure script with following arguments

$ sudo ./configure --enable-core-odbc-support --enable-core-pgsql-support

Now you are ready to compile and install the FreeSWITCH, run following commands in sequence

$ sudo make 
$ sudo make install

To install sound and music on hold run following command

$ sudo make cd-sounds-install
$ sudo make cd-moh-install

FreeSWITCH is now installed and you can confirm it by running sudo freeswitch -nonat from your terminal

Post install setup

By default, FreeSWITCH will install it’s binaries and configurations in /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/freeswitch, to make them available system wide you can create following symlinks

$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/freeswitch/conf /etc/freeswitch 
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/freeswitch/bin/fs_cli /usr/bin/fs_cli 
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/freeswitch/bin/freeswitch /usr/sbin/freeswitch
Create an unprivileged user

Create a unprivileged system user for running FreeSWITCH daemon

$ sudo groupadd freeswitch 
$ sudo adduser --quiet --system --home /usr/local/freeswitch --gecos 'FreeSWITCH open source softswitch' --ingroup freeswitch freeswitch --disabled-password 
$ sudo chown -R freeswitch:freeswitch /usr/local/freeswitch/ 
$ sudo chmod -R ug=rwX,o= /usr/local/freeswitch/ chmod -R u=rwx,g=rx /usr/local/freeswitch/bin/*
Running as systemd service

In order to run FreeSWITCH in background using systemctl, open /etc/systemd/system/freeswitch.service in your favorite editor and copy following content into it

[Unit] 
Description=FreeSWITCH open source softswitch 
Wants=network-online.target Requires=network.target local-fs.target 
After=network.target network-online.target local-fs.target 

[Service] 
; service 
Type=forking 
PIDFile=/usr/local/freeswitch/run/freeswitch.pid 
Environment="DAEMON_OPTS=-nonat" 
Environment="USER=freeswitch" 
Environment="GROUP=freeswitch" 
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/default/freeswitch 
ExecStartPre=/bin/chown -R ${USER}:${GROUP} /usr/local/freeswitch 
ExecStart=/usr/local/freeswitch/bin/freeswitch -u ${USER} -g ${GROUP} -ncwait ${DAEMON_OPTS} 
TimeoutSec=45s 
Restart=always 

[Install] 
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Reload the systemctl daemon

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Start the FreeSWITCH Service

$ sudo systemctl start freeswitch

Check if daemon has start successfully

$ sudo systemctl status freeswitch
Command Line interface

The fs_cli program is a Command-Line Interface that allows a user to connect to a running FreeSWITCH™ instance. The fs_cli program can connect to the FreeSWITCH™ process on the local machine or on a remote system. (Network connectivity to the remote system is, of course, required.)