Send WhatsApp Media Messages Using Node.js

Overview

This guide shows how to send a non templated WhatsApp media messages to any destination WhatsApp numbers.

You can start sending non templated WhatsApp media message messages using our APIs. Follow the instructions below.

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 Node.js 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.js and paste into it this code.

var plivo = require('plivo');

var client = new plivo.Client("<auth_id>", "<auth_token>");
client.messages.create(
      {
         src:"+14151112221",
         dst:"+14151112222",
         type:"whatsapp",
         text: "Hello, this is sample text",
         media_urls:["https://sample-videos.com/img/Sample-png-image-1mb.png"],
         url: "https://foo.com/sms_status/"
       }
       ).then(function (response) {
         console.log(response);
        });

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  would be your phone number registered against your WhatsApp business account. dst  would be the destination WhatsApp number that would receive the message. 

Media is passed using a hosted media url. For details about this param, refer to our documentation. 

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.

send_whatsapp.js
node