WhatsApp Chat Proxy

If you are unable to connect directly to WhatsApp, a proxy can be used as a gateway between you and our servers. To help yourself or others re-establish connection to WhatsApp, you can set up a proxy server.

If you already have a proxy to use, you can connect it to WhatsApp by following the steps in this article.

What you'll need

Docker (enable Docker on startup if your host system allows)
Docker compose (optional)

Setting up your proxy

1. Clone the repository to your local machine

2. Install Docker for your system

3. Install Docker compose

For Linux users, if your version of Docker doesn't come pre-installed with Docker compose, you can install a one-off version (For Linux).

# Download the pkg
sudo curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/latest/download/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m) -o /usr/bin/docker-compose
# Enable execution of the script
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/docker-compose

3. Build the proxy host container

Build the proxy host container with

docker build /path_to_cloned_repository/proxy/ -t whatsapp_proxy:1.0

The container will be compiled and tagged as whatsapp_proxy:1.0 for easy reference.

Please note, the /path_to_cloned_repository should the same folder where you cloned this repository in step 1 above. Additionally, the Dockerfile to build the container is in a sub-folder proxy of the repository.

Running the proxy

Manually execute the container

You can manually execute the Docker container with the following docker command

docker run -it -p 80:80 -p 443:443 -p 5222:5222 -p 8080:8080 -p 8443:8443 -p 8222:8222 -p 8199:8199 whatsapp_proxy:1.0

Automate the container lifecycle with Docker compose

Docker Compose is an automated tool to run multi-container deployments, but it also helps automate the command-line arguments necessary to run a single container. It is a YAML definition file that denotes all the settings to start up and run the container. It also has restart strategies in the event the container crashes or self-restarts. Docker Compose helps manage your container setup and necessary port forwards without user interaction. We recommend utilizing Docker Compose because you usually don’t want to manually run the container outside of testing scenarios.

We provide a sample docker-compose.yml file for you which defines a standard deployment of the proxy container.

Once Docker compose is installed, you can test your specific configuration by running Docker compose interactively with:

docker compose -f /path/to/this/repo/docker-compose.yml up

This will allow you to see the output from the build + container hosting process and check that everything is set up correctly.

When you are ready to run the container as a service, do*:

docker compose -f /path/to/this/repo/docker-compose.yml up -d

*Note the -d flag which means "daemonize" and run as a service.

To stop the container you can similarly do:

docker compose down

Automate host reboots with Docker compose

Once you have Docker compose set up, you can also automate the deployment for host reboots by utilizing a systemd service (if your hosting environment supports it).

We provide a sample docker_boot.service service definition for you which you should customize to your own environment.

To install and setup the systemd service*:

# Copy the service definition to systemd folder
cp -v docker_boot.service /etc/systemd/system/
# Enable starting the service on startup
systemctl enable docker_boot.service
# Start the service (will docker compose up the container)
systemctl start docker_boot.service
# Check container status with
docker ps

*Make sure to update the path to your specific docker-compose.yml file in the service definition docker_boot.service

Kubernetes deployment

If you would like to configure your proxy using Kubernetes, or run the Docker runtime through Kubernetes, please see our Helm chart README

An Overview of the WhatsApp Proxy Architecture

Depending on the scenario in which you utilize your proxy, the proxy container exposes multiple ports. The basic ports may include:

80: Standard web traffic (HTTP)
443: Standard web traffic, encrypted (HTTPS)
5222: Jabber protocol traffic (WhatsApp default)

There are also ports configured which accept incoming proxy headers (version 1 or 2) on connections. If you have a network load balancer you can preserve the client IP address if you want.

8080: Standard web traffic (HTTP) with PROXY protocol expected
8443: Standard web traffic, encrypted (HTTPS) with PROXY protocol expected
8222: Jabber protocol traffic (WhatsApp default) with PROXY protocol expected

Additionally the container exposes a statistics port on :8199 which can be connected to directly with http://<host-ip>:8199 which you can use to monitor HAProxy statistics.

Certificate generation for SSL encrypted ports

Ports 443 and 8443 are protected by a self-signed encryption certificate generated at container start time. There are some custom options should you wish to tweak the settings of the generated certificates

SSL_DNS comma seperate list of alternative hostnames, no default
SSL_IP comma seperate list of alternative IPs, no default

They can be set with commands like

docker build . --build-arg SSL_DNS=test.example.com

Contributors

The authors of this code are Sean Lawlor (@slawlor).

To learn more about contributing to this project, see this document.

License

This project is licensed under MIT.

ghaagh / whatsapp-family