Starting Asterisk on Boot in Debian

Here’s a quickie. You just compiled Asterisk on your Debian server and you want to make sure it starts when you reboot. Here’s how:

Look in the /contrib/init.d folder of your Asterisk source directory. You’ll see a file called rc.debian.asterisk. If you installed Asterisk to the default location, don’t worry about editing this file. If you installed to a different location (eg – /usr/local), change the following line in the file:

DAEMON=/usr/sbin/asterisk

Point this at your Asterisk binary. Not sure where it is? Just type which asterisk from the command line and it will show you the full path.

Next, copy the file into the /etc/init.d/ directory like so:

cp rc.debian.asterisk /etc/init.d/asterisk

(NOTE: I am renaming the file on purpose)

Now you can control Asterisk by executing this script. Make sure it starts and stops before continuing:

/etc/init.d/asterisk start
Starting Asterisk PBX: asterisk.
/etc/init.d/asterisk stop
Stopping Asterisk PBX: asterisk.

Finally, make the system run this script during the boot process:

update-rc.d asterisk defaults

Done and done. Reboot and check the process list just to be sure!