What Installing VICIdial Actually Involves

People often picture installing VICIdial as one program you download and run. It is not. VICIdial is several pieces that have to be installed, configured, and kept talking to each other. Knowing the parts up front saves a lot of confusion when something does not work on the first try.

The telephony engine

At the bottom is Asterisk, the open-source phone system that actually places and answers calls. VICIdial does not dial on its own; it tells Asterisk what to do. Asterisk reads call instructions from its own Dialplan and routing logic stored in its Conf file set under /etc/asterisk. Most installs build a specific Asterisk version from source so it matches what VICIdial expects, which is why the install takes longer than a normal package install.

The web app and AGI scripts

On top of Asterisk sits the VICIdial application itself: a mix of PHP web pages for the admin and agent screens, and Perl scripts that run in the background. Some of those Perl scripts are AGI (Asterisk Gateway Interface) scripts, meaning Asterisk calls them mid-call to make decisions, like which agent gets a connected lead. The web app is what your team logs into; the AGI and background scripts are what make the dialer behave like a dialer.

The database

Everything VICIdial knows lives in a MySQL or MariaDB database: campaigns, leads, dispositions, agent stats, and configuration. The install script creates this database and loads its tables. If the database is slow or sized wrong, the whole dialer feels slow, so it gets real attention during setup.

The keepalive crontab

VICIdial relies on a set of background jobs that are launched and watched by Keepalive entries in the system crontab. These restart the dialing engine, the call-control scripts, and the data loggers if any of them die. Forget the crontab and the dialer simply will not place predictive calls, even though every page loads fine. This is one of the most common reasons a new install looks installed but does nothing.

How the pieces fit

flowchart TD
  A[Web app and AGI scripts] --> B[Database]
  C[Keepalive crontab] --> D[Dialing engine]
  D --> E[Asterisk]
  A --> E
  E --> F[Carrier]
  F --> G[Phone network]

A carrier to dial out

The last piece is outside your server entirely. To reach real phone numbers you need a Carrier, a voice provider that takes your calls from Asterisk and puts them onto the phone network. VICIdial does not include one. You sign up separately, then configure the connection so Asterisk can hand calls over. If you are still picking one, our guide to choosing a SIP carrier walks through what to look for.

Setting expectations

A careful from-scratch install on fresh hardware is usually a few hours of work for someone who has done it before, and a full day or more for a first-timer who hits the normal snags. Compiling Asterisk alone can take a while. None of this is impossible, but it is real systems work, not a one-click setup. For the full picture, start with our complete VICIdial install guide.

If you would rather skip the assembly and have a secured dialer handed to you, VICIfast provisions a managed server in under 40 seconds. See VICIfast pricing for what that includes.