How to restart Asterisk server

You should never restart it. That would be perfect.

But there are situations when you need to do it no matter what.

If you restart/shutdown your Asterisk server when there are active calls going:

1. Users will be disconnected and will not feel very happy about your service;
2. You will loose money on the active calls, because provider will charge you for these calls but you will not be able to charge your users because calls will not be in database.

How to do it in right way?

First execute this command:

asterisk -vvvvvvrx 'stop gracefully'

This command will not let any new calls to begin.

Then execute this:

asterisk -vvvvvvrx 'show channels'

You should see:

0 active channels
0 active calls

If you see other values here - that means you have some active calls going.

Wait some time and then execute same command again. Repeat it till you get 0 calls.

Then you can restart/shutdown your server.