AJAM is a new technology available in Asterisk 1.4 which allows web browsers or other HTTP enabled applications and web pages to directly access the Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) via HTTP. Setting up your server to process AJAM involves a few steps:

Setup the Asterisk HTTP server

---

1) Uncomment the line "enabled=yes" in /etc/asterisk/http.conf to enable Asterisk's builtin micro HTTP server.

2) If you want Asterisk to actually deliver simple HTML pages, CSS, JavaScript, etc. you should uncomment "enablestatic=yes"

3) Adjust your "bindaddr" and "bindport" settings as appropriate for your desired accessibility

4) Adjust your "prefix" if appropriate, which must be the beginning of any URI on the server to match. The default is "asterisk" and the rest of these instructions assume that value.

Allow Manager Access via HTTP

---

1) Make sure you have both "enabled = yes" and "webenabled = yes" setup in /etc/asterisk/manager.conf

2) You may also use "httptimeout" to set a default timeout for HTTP connections.

3) Make sure you have a manager username/secret

Once these configuration changes are complete you can reload or restart Asterisk and you should be able to point your web browser to specific URI's which will allow you to access various web functions. A complete list can be found by typing "show http" at the Asterisk CLI.

Examples:

http://localhost:8088/asterisk/manager?action=login&username=foo&secret=bar

This logs you into the manager interface's "HTML" view. Once you're logged in, Asterisk stores a cookie on your browser (valid for the length of httptimeout) which is used to connect to the same session.

http://localhost:8088/asterisk/rawman?action=status

Assuming you've already logged into manager, this URI will give you a "raw" manager output for the "status" command.

http://localhost:8088/asterisk/mxml?action=status

This will give you the same status view but represented as AJAX data, theoretically compatible with RICO (http://www.openrico.org).

http://localhost:8088/asterisk/static/ajamdemo.html

If you have enabled static content support and have done a make install, Asterisk will serve up a demo page which presents a live, but very basic, "astman" like interface. You can login with your username/secret for manager and have a basic view of channels as well as transfer and hangup calls. It's only tested in Firefox, but could probably be made to run in other browsers as well.

A sample library (astman.js) is included to help ease the creation of manager HTML interfaces.

Note that for the demo, there is no need for *any* external web server.

Integration with other web servers

---

Asterisk's micro HTTP server is *not* designed to replace a general purpose web server and it is intentionally created to provide only the minimal interfaces required. Even without the addition of an external web server, one can use Asterisk's interfaces to implement screen pops and similar tools pulling data from other web servers using iframes, div's etc. If you want to integrate CGI's, databases, PHP, etc. you will likely need to use a more traditional web server like Apache and link in your Asterisk micro HTTP server with something like this:

ProxyPass /asterisk http://localhost:8088/asterisk