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whatsapp-web.js
A WhatsApp client library for NodeJS that connects through the WhatsApp Web browser app
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SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
Node.js WhatsApp API - Since WhatsApp only offers an API for business accounts that requires multiple verification and review steps to get access, we’ll put together our own API using the whatsapp-web.js library. It will forward user messages to our API and send responses from the assistant to the user.
Zod, a popular typescript schema validation library that will let us define the shape of the payload sent to our background job.
WhatsApp Node.js API
Hono API
This library works by creating an instance of WhatsApp web running inside an instance of headless chrome automated by puppeteer. In my testing, I ran into tons of compatibility issues when trying to use these dependencies inside anything other than a bare-bones Node.js + express server. Also, we can’t spin up a new instance of chrome and WhatsApp web each time a user sends a message, this will exhaust our allowed WhatsApp connections (4 max), not to mention that doing this will make the response times painfully slow.
We need to make our WhatsApp API accessible on the internet so the trigger.dev cloud service can connect to it. We can do that by running ngrok in a separate terminal.
Initialize your hono project using bun: