Requirements

Operating system: CentOS, Debian or Ubuntu.

The hardware should be chosen according to the workload you want to be able to sustain. Although flexisip is not quite CPU intensive (unless you are transcoding), you should make sure that your machine has enough RAM.
Up to about 10000 connections, you should be OK with 8 GB of RAM.

Installation from our repositories

Supported distributions

Centos/RockyLinux

1. Install “Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL)” repository ; it is used for some Flexisip dependencies like the Hiredis library.

2. Enable PowerTools repository (RockyLinux/Centos 8 only):

3. Add Belledonne Communications' repository by creating /etc/yum.repos.d/BelledonneCom.repo with the following content:

4. Perform the actual installation:

The installation is completed. You can directly go to Post-installation instructions section.

Debian/Ubuntu

1. Create the Belledonne Communications' APT repo in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/belledonne.list.

You may uncomment 'beta' and/or 'alpha' branches if you need access to pre-release and/or development packages, but keep in mind that stable branch must always be enabled because some external dependencies of Flexisip are provided through it.

2. Install Belledonne Communications' PGP key for package signature checking

3. Install development packages for the SQL backend (example below for Mariadb, classic use case)

/!\ Not doing this can result in the following error: "[SOCI] connection pool open error: Failed to find shared library for backend mysql"

4. Update APT cache and install Flexisip and its dependencies

The installation is completed. You can directly go to Post-installation instructions section.

Installation from sources using git

The source code of Flexisip is available on our GitLab instance here.

1. Fetch the source code by cloning the repository recursively:

Replace <branch_name> by one of the following:

• A release tag name if you want a specific release (e.g. "2.0.0").
• A release branch name if you want a specific release plus all post release fixes (e.g. "release/2.0")
• "master" if you want the development version.

2. Follow the instructions in README.md file at the root of the project.

Post-installation instructions

Generate the configuration file

Make Flexisip generate its default configuration file:

This generated file contains all the available settings with their respective documentation.

By default, Flexisip behaves as a simple forwarding proxy. See the Configuration chapter for more information on how to customize it.

Starting the needed services

Flexisip's executable is installed in /opt/belledonne-communications/bin/flexisip . Running it without any argument will make Flexisip behave as a SIP proxy, but it can provide other kind of services. This can be chosen by using --server command-line argument, which takes three values:

• proxy: launch Flexisip as a SIP proxy (default behaviour).
• presence: launch Flexisip as a presence server.
• conference: launch Flexisip as a conference server (group chat).

Flexisip is also provided with several SystemD scripts in order to be run as a system daemon. There is one SystemD service for each kind of server. For instance, the following command will run the proxy and the presence server:

By default, Flexisip isn't programmed to start at system boot-up. You may do so by calling:

The three services (proxy, presence, conference) run in their own process. They can be run together on the same machine or spread on several hosts.

Firewall configuration

On a fresh RedHat or CentOS installation, the firewall is turned ON by default, with almost all ports forbidden. Flexisip won't be able to operate at all under these conditions.

Simply turning off the firewall will allow full operation:

However your system administrator may not like this approach, and will prefer enabling selective ports. A Flexisip server will generally need:

• TCP ports for SIP/SIPS: these are the ports mentionned in the transports definition of global section of flexisip.conf ;
• the 3478 UDP port for the builtin STUN server that helps clients to use ICE for efficient media stream transmissions ;
• the media relay UDP ports, for the media relay service of Flexisip, which uses randomly selected ports in a configurable range.

Update Flexisip

1. Before updating, you should note the current running version in order to rollback if the update breaks your service:

2. Update the packages:

3. Check the start date of SystemD services to ensure that the servers have restarted after the update:

4. If the service is broken after the update, then rollback: