praekeltfoundation/freeswitch repository overview

⁠docker-freeswitch

Dockerfile for running FreeSWITCH⁠ in a Docker container.

• Base image: debian:jessie
• Exposed ports: None
• Volumes: None

⁠Usage

You should generally run the container with host networking. Something like:

docker run -d --net host --name freeswitch praekeltfoundation/freeswitch

If you want to use FreeSWITCH's CLI, you can use Docker's exec command to connect to the running container:

docker exec -it freeswitch fs_cli

⁠Packages

This is NOT a complete FreeSWITCH installation - the Docker image only contains the "meta-vanilla" packages as well as a couple of extra modules. FreeSWITCH is a very large software project with many submodules. We install only the features that we need. Still, this may be a useful starting point for anybody looking to run FreeSWITCH under Docker.

We install the following FreeSWITCH packages:

• freeswitch-meta-vanilla
• freeswitch-mod-flite (for text-to-speech)
• freeswitch-mod-shout (for playing audio from files)

⁠Networking

It is not recommended that you use Docker's bridge networking mode for FreeSWITCH as some of the protocols (namely, SIP) make use of a very large number of ports and it is not feasible to forward all of these ports to the host. Instead, consider using Docker's host networking mode or, in Docker 1.9+, the virtual overlay networking mode.

⁠Configuration

For the most part we use the default "vanilla" configuration that FreeSWITCH installs in /usr/share/freeswitch/conf/vanilla. However, we do override some of the configuration options. The changes are as follows:

• autoload_configs/console.conf.xml:
  • Disable console colorizing as this seems to break some logging systems.
• autoload_configs/modules.conf.xml:
  • Disable mod_logfile as the container logs are consumed from stdout/stderr, not a file.
  • Enable mod_h26x for H.263/4 CODEC support.
  • Enable mod_flite.
  • Enable mod_shout.
• directory/default/example.com.xml:
  • This file is renamed to prevent FreeSWITCH from setting up an example (and non-functional) SIP gateway.