Introduction

wapi puts a stable REST API in front of WhatsApp. There is no official API for personal accounts — the only way in is to drive a real WhatsApp client — so wapi does that and gives you 57 HTTP endpoints, three SDKs, a CLI and webhooks on top of it.

It is a fidelity clone of the WasenderAPI surface: 46 of those endpoints match theirs path for path, envelope for envelope, including the parts that are inconsistent. Their published SDK works against wapi unmodified — you change the base URL and nothing else.

▶78 seconds

Seventy-eight seconds on a live WhatsApp account — messages, attachments and a group, with delivery acknowledgements read back from WhatsApp itself — then a sandbox, where an invented contact fires a genuine webhook. Every command was recorded from the real CLI.

Start without a phone number

Linking a real number needs a phone, a QR scan, and an account you are willing to have banned. A sandbox session needs none of them: a fake number on a fake WhatsApp that pairs itself in seconds, runs through the same routes and the same code as a real session, and can be made to receive messages so your webhook handler gets a genuine signed delivery to prove itself against.

It is also the only safe place to rehearse the writes — creating a group, promoting a participant, blocking a contact — because on a real number every one of those touches real people.

Pick a language

What to read first

Two credentials do different jobs and are not interchangeable — that is the thing people get wrong first, so Authentication is worth five minutes before anything else. After that, Sending messages covers the endpoint you will use most, and Errors explains why failures come back in two different shapes on purpose.