selfphoneng/docs/admin-guide/maintenance.md

Updating, backups and monitoring

Updating SelfPhoneNG

SelfPhoneNG has no releases yet. How to update will be documented, with a tested update script, when version 1.0 ships.

Asterisk security releases

SelfPhoneNG builds Asterisk from source, checking the download against Asterisk's published checksum. New Asterisk versions come with SelfPhoneNG updates.

To take an Asterisk fix before that, build the version you need yourself. Release numbers are listed at https://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/.

docker compose build --build-arg ASTERISK_VERSION=24.0.1 asterisk
docker compose up -d asterisk
docker compose exec asterisk asterisk -rx "core show version"

A later rebuild without --build-arg goes back to the version the code names.

Backups

Settings → Backups:

• Back up every day at a time you choose, keeping the newest few.
• Back up now makes one right away.
• The list downloads any of them.

A backup (data/backups/selfphoneng-YYYYMMDD-HHMM.tar.gz) holds:

• the database: users, extensions, numbers, settings, call history;
• voicemail;
• your sounds and music on hold;
• call recordings, if you tick "Include call recordings" (they can be large).

If a daily backup fails, the admins get an email, and the dashboard warns while today's backup is missing.

Two things a backup doesn't hold:

1. .env. Its APP_SECRET encrypts the SIP and trunk passwords inside the backup.
   • A backup can only be restored with the .env it was made with, so keep a copy of .env in a password manager.
   • The backup itself holds no plain passwords.
2. A copy anywhere else. Backups sit on the same disk as the system. Copy them off the server regularly, e.g. with a nightly cron job: rsync -a /opt/selfphoneng/data/backups/ backup-host:selfphoneng/.

Restoring

./scripts/restore.sh /path/to/selfphoneng-20261019-0300.tar.gz

The script:

• refuses if .env's APP_SECRET isn't the one the backup was made with;
• shows what the backup holds and asks you to type yes;
• replaces the database and those folders, then starts everything again.

Asterisk's config is rebuilt from the restored database. Sign in with the passwords from the backup.

Moving to a new server

1. Clone SelfPhoneNG on the new server.
2. Copy your old .env into the folder.
3. Run ./scripts/install.sh. It keeps the existing .env.
4. Run ./scripts/restore.sh <backup>.
5. If the public IP changed: update it on Settings → Network, change your DNS record and any IP-based settings at voip.ms (IP authentication, API whitelist), then docker compose restart asterisk.
6. Desk phones fetch their setup from the host name, so they follow the DNS change.

Monitoring

Emails to admins. SelfPhoneNG emails every admin when:

• a trunk has been down for 5 minutes (one email per outage);
• the disk is under 10% free (once a day);
• the public IP changed (with the re-check turned on);
• a daily backup failed.

These need Settings → Email working.

Health check for an uptime monitor (Uptime Kuma or similar), on the server itself:

curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/healthz      # 200 {"ok":true}, or 503 when the database is down

From outside, monitor https://pbx.example.com/healthz.

The dashboard shows trunks, active calls, queues and warnings (emergency setup, certificate, backups, restart needed) live.

Keeping logs small

Asterisk's log files in data/asterisk-logs/ grow forever. Rotate them with logrotate. Create /etc/logrotate.d/selfphoneng:

/opt/selfphoneng/data/asterisk-logs/*.log {
    weekly
    rotate 8
    compress
    delaycompress
    missingok
    notifempty
    copytruncate
}

copytruncate lets Asterisk keep writing to the same file. fail2ban and CrowdSec notice the file shrinking.

The api's logs are Docker's. Limit them in /etc/docker/daemon.json with "log-opts": {"max-size": "20m", "max-file": "5"}, restart Docker, then docker compose up -d --force-recreate (the limit only applies to new containers).