Happy new year again dear reader, hopefully you had wonderful holidays.
Me? I spent my holidays getting increasingly frustrated by a small software named FreePBX.

FreePBX, as its name suggest, is… a PBX… manager, PBX meaning Private Branch Exchange, or to do simple, your very own VoIP and telephony server.
As mentioned, FreePBX is only a front-end for another software called Asterisk, which does the real phone stuff in the background.

While both software are Open-Source, FreePBX being under (A)GPL v3 (for the most part, more on that later), and Asterisk GPLv2, there is a giant gap in quality between the two.
While Asterisk generally works like you would expect it to, FreePBX has been a hassle at all level, all the more exacerbated by the current documentation, being one of the worst I’ve seen in recent times.

More than that, the default FreePBX installation script installs a plethora of proprietary “commercial” modules, which has the tendency to show you ads on login.
It’s because of that poor documentation that I’m starting this small series of tutorial on how to make your own phone system using FreePBX.

“But Jae”, some might say, “why don’t you just contribute to the project instead”? The answer is simple: I’m not signing no damn SLA.


The installation

Of course, we have to start somewhere, and I actually think installing FreePBX is a good one.
There are two ways to install FreePBX:

  • The distribution version, which is a modified Debian 12 ISO that ships FreePBX by default
  • The automated installation script hosted on GitHub

In this tutorial, we’re gonna focus on the script version, as I have no idea how you’re getting servers, been provisioning them via a public cloud or having a spare machine.
So we’re going to make a few assumptions:

  • You have a running Debian 12 server, freshly installed
  • You know how to follow instructions
  • The domain we’ll use is example.com (of course, replace with your domain)
  • Your server is equivalent or above of a Hetzner CPX22 (4Gb RAM, 80Gb disk 2vCPU)

So SSH into your server, and let’s start the installation by:

# Get the actual script
$ wget https://github.com/FreePBX/sng_freepbx_debian_install/raw/master/sng_freepbx_debian_install.sh -O /tmp/sng_freepbx_debian_install.sh

# Don't forget to audit it :)
$ less /tmp/sng_freepbx_debian_install.sh

# And start the install
$ bash /tmp/sng_freepbx_debian_install.shCode language: Bash (bash)


This will take a while, go fill your bottle of water and get hydrated properly in the meanwhile.


Once this is done, our first step will be getting rid of most of the proprietary modules; sadly, some provide functionality that is needed to not have the worst experience in the world.
This step will throw errors, but don’t worry, in the FreePBX world, that’s normal.

# First, we get rid of everything
$ for x in $( fwconsole ma list | grep Commercial | awk '{print $2}' ); do fwconsole ma delete $x; done

# Install some dependencies
$ apt install build-essential

# Now we re-add the admin tools add-on
$ 

# Upgrade the rest
$ fwconsole ma upgradeall

# Double check for any remaining commercial modules
$ fwconsole ma list

# Small note: do NOT uninstall the sysadmin module since it's one of the essentials. The following is also an example.
$ fwconsole ma remove endpointCode language: Bash (bash)


Now, let’s head to the web interface using the IP displayed after the installation. There, you will have to set up basics such as the admin user and password.

Screenshot of the FreePBX initial setup screen asking for admin credentials.


Congrats, you now have a FreePBX instance! Beware, you’ll need to skip a few ads.

Once you have done this step, log into the FreePBX dashboard.
Make sure to enable the smart firewall when prompted, this is critical as bots will instantly hammer your server.

This will have the side effect of terminating your SSH connection, get your IP address (or even better, prefix), on the navigation bar, go in “Connectivity” then “Firewall”.
There, in the “Networks” tab, add your prefixes by clicking the small green “+”, hit “Save” in the bottom right and finally, hit “Apply config” in the top right.

You’ll see that “Apply config” button a lot, as most actions will require you to press it.


Configuring the basics

Now, we’re going to give the only concession we’ll ever give to FreePBX. Find some temporary email address and mailbox, it’ll be important in a few lines.

In the navigation bar, head to “Admin”, then “System Admin” near the bottom. On this page, click “Activate” (on the bottom right), and follow the prompts on screen, giving the add-on your fake email.
Don’t forget to put fake phone numbers as well.

Once you have an installation ID on screen, copy it, it’s faster to activate through the command line interface like so:

$ fwconsole sysadmin activate <deployment ID>
Code language: Bash (bash)


Thereafter, refresh the page, and you’ll see new options on the right.
In those new options, click on “HTTPS Setup” and open the “Here” hyperlink in a new tab.

On this new page, hit “New certificate”, then “Generate Let’s Encrypt Certificate”, and fill in the info with what you have. When you’re done, hit “Generate certificate” in the bottom-right corner.

Screenshot of the FreePBX certificate generator.



You can now close this tab and come back to the one we left open. Refresh the page, then head into “Settings”, select your certificate in the dropdown and hit “Install”.
Congrats, now you can access your PBX admin panel via HTTPS.



… and that’s it for today.

Don’t miss the next tutorial, in which we’ll start adding extensions and configure emails.