What is FreePBX?

FreePBX is build using Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) technology. It is the defacto standard Graphical User Interface (GUI) for Asterisk administration.

FreePBX is an integral part of the project package because it makes configuring and implementing standard telephony features much easier than hand editing the /etc/asterisk/*.conf files.

There is no FreePBX module for manipulating the Asterisk app_rpt rpt.conf file. Contact the developers if you'd like to undertake this task!

Basically, HTML pages are generated by PHP code and served by the Apache webserver. The source of the configuration data is held in a MySQL database. When changes are made to the HTML pages they are first applied to the MySQL database. Then when the changes are ultimately applied the PHP code extracts the information from the MySQL database, regenerates the *.conf files and call upon the running Asterisk process to reload the configuration files.

For this reason any hand edited changes to the *.conf files will be overwritten when the changes are applied. The FreePBX convention is to include *-custom.conf files in the main *.conf files (e.g. iax-custom.conf is included in iax.conf). These custom files can be edited, their features will be included with the rest of the FreePBX GUI configuration and they will not be overwritten when database changes are applied.

It is a great delight that these custom.conf files are also backed up by the FreePBX backup script.