Simplifying device creation in sip.conf - asterisk

Question

I often have to define many similar devices in sip.conf like this:
[device](!)
; setting some parameters
[device01](device)
callerid=dev01 <01>
[device02](device)
callerid=dev02 <02>
; ...
[deviceXX](device)
callerid=devXX <XX>
The question is perhaps I could avoid setting device-name specific parameters by using some variable like following?
[device](!)
callerid=dev${DEVICE_NAME:-2} <${DEVICE_NAME:-2}>
; setting some parameters
[device01](device)
[device02](device)
; ...
[deviceXX](device)
P.S.
It would be perfect, if there was some device constructor, so I could reduce the script to following, but, I think, that is not possible in Asterisk.
[device](!)
callerid=dev${DEVICE_NAME:-2} <${DEVICE_NAME:-2}>
; setting some parameters
;[device${MAGIC_LOOP(1,XX,leading_zeroes)}](device)

Answer 1

I've had good results writing a small program that takes care of it. It checks for a line saying something like
------- Automatically generated -------
and whatever is after that line, it's going to be regenerated as soon as it detects that there are new values for it (it could be from a database or from a text file). Then, I run it with supervisor and it checks every XX seconds if there are changes.
If there are changes, it issues a sip reload command after updating the sip.conf file
I wrote it in python, but whatever language you feel comfortable with should work just fine.
That's how I managed that and has been working fine so far (after a couple of months). I'd be extremely interested in learning about other approaches though. It's basically this (called from another script with supervisor):
users = get_users_logic()
#get the data that will me used on the sip.conf file
data_to_be_hashed = reduce(lambda x, y: x + y, map(lambda x: x['username'] + x['password'] + x['company_prefix'], users))
m = hashlib.md5()
m.update(str(data_to_be_hashed).encode("ascii"))
new_md5 = m.hexdigest()
last_md5 = None
try:
file = open(os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__)) + '/lastMd5.txt', 'r')
last_md5 = file.read().rstrip()
file.close()
except:
pass
# if it changed...
if new_md5 != last_md5:
#needs update
with open(settings['asterisk']['path_to_sip_conf'], 'r') as file:
sip_content = file.read().rstrip()
parts = sip_content.split(";-------------- BEYOND THIS POINT IT IS AUTO GENERATED --------------;")
sip_content = parts[0].rstrip()
sip_content += "\n\n;-------------- BEYOND THIS POINT IT IS AUTO GENERATED --------------;\n\n"
for user in users:
m = hashlib.md5()
m.update(("%s:sip.ellauri.it:%s" % (user['username'], user['password'])).encode("ascii"))
md5secret = m.hexdigest()
sip_content += "[%s]\ntype = friend\ncontext = %sLocal\nmd5secret = %s\nhost = dynamic\n\n" % (
user['username'], user['company_prefix'], md5secret)
#write the sip.conf file
f = open(settings['asterisk']['path_to_sip_conf'], 'w')
print(sip_content, file=f)
f.close()
subprocess.call('asterisk -x "sip reload"', shell=True)
#write the new md5
f = open(os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__)) + '/lastMd5.txt', 'w')
print(new_md5, file=f)
f.close()