When you are setting up SIP servers, you always need to run scenario tests to verify that messages flow properly from end to end. While there are commercial tools to perform these tests, such as Sigma from NetAxis, many people choose to test with opensource tools. The most common of these tools is SIPp. While SIPp is very powerful, building scenario files can be extremely time-consuming.

Recently, I was frustrated with SIPp and found another great tool for basic scenario tests. This tool doesn’t work for load testing, but general scenario testing, it is amazing. This tool is called bbs or “black box sip“. The one challenge with bbs is that you need to download PJSIP and build it from source on your machine. This too can be a bit of a hassle.

Docker Images Save the Day

… Of course you can save a lot of time and frustration by pulling the docker image that I created. This image has bbs installed and will support testing with TLS. UDP, or TCP.

To obtain the image, you, of course, need docker installed. Once you have docker, run “docker pull voipengineertraining/sip-items:bbs”. This will download the image.

To run the container and use an interactive shell:

docker run -p  5060:5060 -it voipengineertraining/sip-items:bbs 

Once in the shell, you can run:

“bbs -vvvvvv -c <scenario> ” to run a scenario file

You can also build scenarios locally on your machine, and then map a volume to docker:

docker run -p 5060:5060 -v /my_scenario/directory:/bbs -it voipengineertraining/sip-items:bbs  bbs -c /bbs/scenario.yaml

Learn more about Black Box SIP here: https://github.com/irontec/bbs