Send Text Messages

Overview

This guide shows how to send a non-templated WhatsApp text message to a destination WhatsApp number using our APIs. Follow these instructions:

Prerequisites

To get started, 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 APIs, follow our instructions to set up a PHP development environment.

Non-templated WhatsApp messages can be sent as a reply to a user-initiated conversation (Service conversation) or if there is an existing ongoing conversation created previously by sending a templated WhatsApp message.

Create the send WhatsApp application

Create a file called send_whatsapp.php and paste into it this code.

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Plivo\RestClient;

$client = new RestClient("<auth_id>","<auth_token>");
$response = $client->messages->create(
[
"src" => "+14151112221",
"dst" => "+14151112222",
"text" =>"Hello, this is sample text",
"type"=>"whatsapp",
"url"=>"https://foo.com/sms_status/"
]
);
print_r($response);
// Prints only the message_uuid
print_r($response->getmessageUuid(0));
?>

Replace the auth placeholders with your authentication credentials from the Plivo console. Replace the phone number placeholders with actual phone numbers in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234). src should be a phone number registered against your WhatsApp Business Account. dst should be the destination WhatsApp number that you want to receive the message.

Text is passed using the text parameter. For details about this param, refer to our documentation.

Note: We recommend that you store your credentials in theauth_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 going to the console’s Phone Numbers > Sandbox Numbers page.