Send Authentication Templated Messages

Overview

This guide shows how to send authentication templates to any WhatsApp number. Authentication templates are critical to fulfil your 2FA or OTP authentication use case. You can send authentication templates by simple passing the otp value in the body component and defining it as a text parameter.

You can start sending authentication templates using our APIs. Follow the instructions below.

Prerequisites

First, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. If this is your first time using Plivo’s APIs, follow our instructions to set up a Node.js development environment

Once you have a Plivo account, follow our WhatsApp guide to onboard your WhatsApp account, register a number against your WhatsApp Business Account (WABA), and get your first template approved. You can send your first message when your phone number is connected and a template is approved.

Create send WhatsApp application

Create a file called SendWhatsApp.js and paste into it this code.

var plivo = require('plivo');

var client = new plivo.Client("<auth_id>", "<auth_token>");

const template = {
  "name": "plivo_authentication_template",
  "language": "en_US",
  "components": [
    {
      "type": "body",
      "parameters": [
        {
          "type": "text",
          "text": "33422388"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}
client.messages.create(
      {
        src:"+14151112221",
        dst:"+14151112222",
        type:"whatsapp",
        template:template,
        url: "https://foo.com/sms_status/"
      }
      ).then(function (response) {
        console.log(response);
        });

Replace the “auth” placeholders with your authentication credentials found on the Plivo console.

Replace the phone number placeholders with the phone numbers you wish to use in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234). src is the phone number registered against your WABA. dst refers to the WhatsApp number that will receive the message.

Note: We recommend that you store your credentials in the auth_id and auth_token environment variables to avoid the possibility of accidentally committing them to source control. If you do this, you can initialize the client with no arguments and Plivo will automatically fetch the values from the environment variables. You can use process.env to store environment variables and fetch them when initializing the client.

Test

Save the file and run it.

Note: If you’re using a Plivo trial account, you can send messages only to phone numbers that have been verified with Plivo. You can verify (sandbox) a number by navigating to the console’s Phone Numbers > Sandbox Numbers page.