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-conf-vanilla
• 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 a network type that gives the container its own IP address.

We disable IPv6 networking for Sofia and the Event Socket as there seem to be problems in some recent versions of FreeSWITCH with platforms that don't support IPv6 (e.g. inside a Docker container with bridge networking with the default Docker daemon settings).

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/event_socket.conf.xml:
  • Bind to 0.0.0.0 instead of :: to disable IPv6 (which has issues as described above).
• 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.
• sip_profiles/{external,internal}-ipv6.xml:
  • These files are renamed to disable IPv6 SIP profiles.