Advanced Usage

WhatsFly provides access to the underlying WhatsApp protobufs, allowing you to send complex messages that aren't explicitly covered by the simple API methods.

Using Protobufs with sendMessage

The sendMessage method's message parameter can accept either a string (for simple text) or a WAWebProtobufsE2E_pb2.Message object.

Example: Sending a Contact Card

To send a contact card (VCard), you can construct the protobuf manually.

from whatsfly.proto.waE2E import WAWebProtobufsE2E_pb2

# Create the base message object
msg = WAWebProtobufsE2E_pb2.Message()

# Add a contact message
msg.contactMessage.displayName = "John Doe"
msg.contactMessage.vcard = "BEGIN:VCARD\nVERSION:3.0\nFN:John Doe\nTEL;type=CELL;type=VOICE;waid=1234567890:+1234567890\nEND:VCARD"

# Send it
whatsapp.sendMessage("recipient_phone_number", msg)

Example: Sending a Location

from whatsfly.proto.waE2E import WAWebProtobufsE2E_pb2

msg = WAWebProtobufsE2E_pb2.Message()
msg.locationMessage.degreesLatitude = -6.1754
msg.locationMessage.degreesLongitude = 106.8272
msg.locationMessage.name = "Monas"
msg.locationMessage.address = "Jakarta, Indonesia"

whatsapp.sendMessage("recipient_phone_number", msg)

Custom Event Handling

You can add multiple event handlers or replace the default one.

def my_custom_handler(whatsapp, event):
    if event.get("eventType") == "Connected":
        print("Connected successfully!")

whatsapp._userEventHandlers.append(my_custom_handler)

Environment Variables

Variable	Description
WHATSFLY_NO_UPDATES	If set, WhatsFly will not attempt to check for or download binary updates from GitHub.

Manual Binary Management

By default, WhatsFly downloads pre-compiled Go binaries for your architecture. If you want to use your own compiled version, run make build on the repository before installing the library.