Install Asterisk via apt or from source?

[2br-2b]

Hello!

I’m working on learning about Asterisk. I found many tutorials which say to build Asterisk from source; however, I also see that Asterisk is available in Ubuntu’s package manager.

I haven’t seen anything about this online, so I wanted to learn why I rarely see it mentioned, even in the Asterisk installation wiki. Is this not a legitimate copy of asterisk, it is not updated regularly and thus isn’t recommended, is it new enough that documentation hasn’t been updated, or is there some other reason?

I understand that you don’t get as much control when you don’t build from source and that you’re then reliant on your package manager to update the package before you can get newer versions, so I’m trying to see if it’s just a question of controlling the installation process or if there are other reasons behind this.

Thank you so much!

[jcolp]

The project doesn’t produce distro packages, so we don’t explicitly mention them because we don’t control them, update them, etc.

[Pooh]

The Asterisk development team itself does not create DEB packages of Asterisk;
however the Ubuntu package maintainers do.

If you trust the packages which Ubuntu provides for all your other software,
there is no reason not to trust the Asterisk packages too.

You may wish to compare the versions listed at:

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=asterisk

with the support details shown at:

https://docs.asterisk.org/About-the-Project/Asterisk-Versions/

This should help you to choose an appropriate version to install, which will
keep you going for a good length of time.

Antony.

[ldo]

My clients mainly use Debian for servers, because of its rock-solid stability. It comes with a huge range of packages, including ones for Asterisk, Kamailio etc, that seem to work fine.