This month’s blog is from Chris Dolese, VP of Support at Sangoma and longtime member of the FreePBX community since the days of Asterisk at Home. Chris gave a presentation at Astricon about FreePBX 17, and today introduces the beta launch of the Debian install script. Over to you Chris …
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Hello Everyone
A few weeks ago, the FreePBX GitHub repo for the official FreePBX 17 Debian Install script was marked as public. This action marks a major milestone in the history of the FreePBX project. There are a number of firsts to note:
- First officially supported system based on Debian
- First time FreePBX Engineering has published a script for a supported system install
- First supported system install method that’s licensed as GNU GPL
As Nenad Corbic announced in his blog post back in December, starting in FreePBX 17, the officially supported FreePBX system will be based on Debian 12 and the project will no longer publish an ISO. The advantages of going with Debian have been enumerated before, but of note to users will be the strides to support the upstream versions of Debian services, which at the time of this writing is PHP 8.2.7, node.js 18.19.0, Fail2Ban 1.0.2, and Apache 2.4.57.
If you had a chance to see my presentation a few weeks ago at Astricon, you already know that we’ve been recording some performance improvements in FreePBX 17 over similarly configured systems running 16.
The official FreePBX Debian Install script is now in BETA, the magic lives on GitHub at
https://github.com/FreePBX/sng_freepbx_debian_install
We encourage everyone to give the beta version a try. Fire up a new Debian 12 system on your favorite VM. Login at as root or as a user with sudo privileges, locate the full URL to the raw script from the GitHub repo above, and at the Debian bash prompt:
sudo -i
Enter root password and run the commands**:
cd /tmp
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FreePBX/sng_freepbx_debian_install/master/sng_freepbx_debian_install.sh
chmod +x sng_freepbx_debian_install.sh
./sng_freepbx_debian_install.sh
If you’re already running a FreePBX system, and if you’re careful, a good way to start testing 17 is by restoring a backup. Remember to take steps to disable (or delete) any trunks after restore. You don’t ever want to have trunk registrations from multiple systems at the same time or inbound calls will be unpredictable – i know this:) The restore method is not only a great way to test the backup/restore module but remember the restore operation will be critical as migrations to 17 will only happen in this manner. It’s also the fastest way to get a test config up and running quickly. If you run into any bugs, please open a bug ticket on GitHub. If you have questions, join the conversation already underway in the Beta category at the FreePBX Forum.
A note about supported versions
The FreePBX project has a longstanding policy of only supporting two major versions. When a new version is released – the one that is two major versions behind becomes EOL. WIth the Official FreePBX 17 System now in Beta, FreePBX 15 now officially becomes security fixes only. New features and most bug fixes will now only be made available for FreePBX 16 and 17 going forward. Security issues and major bug fixes can still be expected for FreePBX 15 until 17 is ready for general release.
A note about SNG7 Support
SNG7 is the operating system upon which the supported FreePBX Distro versions 15 and 16 are based. SNG7 is itself derived from CentOS 7 which goes end of life in June of 2024. FreePBX Engineering will continue to support FreePBX 16 on SNG7 after the June EOL date, but there will be no more OS updates from CentOS upstream after this date.
Chris Dolese, VP Support, Sangoma Technologies
** edit 2024-03-19 The first method outlined in this blog post for downloading and running the script was timing out on some systems and causing issues. It is recommended that the above commands be used.