Send Button Messages

Overview

This guide shows how to send non-templated interactive button messages to recipients using Plivo’s APIs. You can only send a non-templated WhatsApp message as a reply to a user-initiated conversation or as part of an existing ongoing conversation that started with a templated WhatsApp message.

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 Ruby development environment.

Create the send WhatsApp application

Create a file called send_whatsapp.rb and paste into it this code.

require ""rubygems""
require ""/usr/src/app/lib/plivo.rb""
include Plivo

api = RestClient.new(""<auth_id>"",""<auth_token>"")

interactive= {
        ""type"": ""button"",
        ""header"": {
            ""type"": ""media"",
            ""media"": ""https://media.geeksforgeeks.org/wp-content/uploads/20190712220639/ybearoutput-300x225.png""
        },
        ""body"": {
            ""text"": ""Make your selection""
        },
        ""action"": {
            ""buttons"": [
                {
                    ""title"": ""Click here"",
                    ""id"": ""bt1j1k2j""
                },
                {
                    ""title"": ""Know More"",
                    ""id"": ""bt1j1k2jkjk""
                },
                {
                    ""title"": ""Request Callback"",
                    ""id"": ""bt1j1kfd2jkjk""
                }
            ]
        }
    }

response = api.messages.create( src: ""+14151112221"",dst:""+14151112222"",type:""whatsapp"", interactive:interactive)
puts response

Replace the auth placeholders with your authentication credentials from the Plivo console. Replace the phone number placeholders with your phone numbers in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234).

src

should be a phone number registered to your WhatsApp Business Account.

dst

should be the recipient’s WhatsApp number.

Note: We recommend that you store your credentials in the auth_id and auth_token environment variables to avoid 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.

Note: If you’re using a Plivo trial account, you can only send messages to phone numbers that have been verified with Plivo. You can verify (sandbox) a number by going to the console’s Phone Numbers > Sandbox Numbers page.