Settings container

A settings container is a reusable block of configuration in VICIdial. You write down a chunk of phone or device settings once, give it a name, and then point many phones at that name. Change the container, and every phone that uses it picks up the change — no editing each phone by hand.

This matters once you have more than a handful of phones. Imagine fifty Softphone entries that all need the same Codec order or the same SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) options. Without a container you would copy those lines fifty times and hope you never miss one. With a container, the shared settings live in a single place and each phone just references it.

The contents look like the raw lines you would otherwise drop into a Conf file for that device — the low-level knobs Asterisk understands. VICIdial folds the container's text in when it builds the device's real configuration, so a setting you put in the container ends up exactly where it would have gone if you had typed it on the phone itself.

A few habits keep this clean. Name containers for what they do, not for one phone. Test a change on one phone before you let it ripple to fifty, since a typo in a container that affects Phone registration can knock a whole batch of devices offline at once. And keep the idea separate from a User group: a settings container is about device configuration, while a user group is about which people can do what.