Installing and configuring Kannel SMS Gateway

Kannel is an open source SMS and WAP gateway. It's freely available software used by operators, carriers, mobile aggregators and other users to send and receive SMS messages and mobile content.
Further details of Kannel can be found at Kannel's Website . There are many different ways to implement Kannel so it depends what your need is.

A lot of users setup Kannel to connect to HTTP and SMPP providers in order to send SMS messages. In this post I will show how to install, configure and send your first SMS using the gateway

For reference, the user guide can be found at http://www.kannel.com/userguide.shtml

1. Firstly ensure all software requirements are installed and then download the source from the Kannel Download site.

wget http://www.kannel.com/download/1.4.3/gateway-1.4.3.tar.gz

2. Extract the archive file to directory.

tar -xzvf gateway-1.4.3.tar.gz

3. Change to the directory to compile

cd gateway-1.4.3

We want to install to /usr/local so we complete the following steps


./configure  ---prefix=/usr/local/kannel
make
make install

4. Change to the new directory that has been created

cd /usr/local/kannel

5. All the files for kannel are now located in this directory. In order to get Kannel up and running quickly we need to create a new config file.

Refer the the user guide for all parameters available, however the following configuration file is useful for setting up a main 'bearerbox' with an 'smsbox' in which we can send messages to an SMPP carrier.
Substitute fields highlighted with you own details. Example files can also be found in the original source files.

vi kannel.conf

group = core
dlr-storage = internal
admin-port = 13000
admin-password = password
status-password = password
admin-allow-ip = ''
smsbox-port = 13001
log-level = 0
log-file = "/usr/local/kannel/logs/kannel.log"
box-allow-ip = "127.0.0.1"

group = smsbox
smsbox-id = BOX1
bearerbox-host = 127.0.0.1
sendsms-port = 13013
log-file = "usr/local/kannel/logs/smsbox.log"
log-level = 0
access-log = "usr/local/kannel/logs/access.log"

group = sendsms-user
username = user1
password = password1

group = smsc
smsc = smpp
smsc-id = SMSC1
host = 111.111.111.111
port = 12345
smsc-username = my smsc details
smsc-password = my smsc password
address-range = ""
system-type = ""
transceiver-mode = true


6. To start the gateway run the following command

/usr/local/kannel/sbin/bearerbox kannel.conf

ensure kannel.conf is replaced with the full path to you configuration file.

Start the sms box also

/usr/local/kannel/sbin/smsbox kannel.conf

8. You can view the status of the gateway by typing the following in a browser

localhost:13000/status?password=password

7. To test the functionality of the gateway, in a browser send a new sms message to the gateway using the following url:

http://localhost:13013/cgi-bin/sendsms?username=user1&password=password1&to=0123456789&from=4444&text=testmessage


 For further reference, the user guide can be found at http://www.kannel.com/userguide.shtml