Sending Authentication Templated Messages Using Python

Overview

This guide shows how to send authentication templates to any destination WhatsApp numbers. Authentication templates are critical to fulfil your 2FA or OTP authentication use case. You can start sending authentication templates using our APIs. Follow the instructions below.

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 Python development environment.

Once you have a Plivo account, follow our WhatsApp guide to onboard your WhatsApp account, register a number against your WABA and have a template in an approved state.

If your phone number is in connected state and your authentication template is in approved state, you can send your first message.

Create Send WhatsApp application

Create a file called send_authentication_whatsapp.py and paste into it this code.

"import plivo
from plivo.utils.template import Template

client = plivo.RestClient('<auth_id>','<auth_token>')

template=Template(**{
        "name"": "plivo_authentication_template",
        "language": "en_US",
        "components": [
                {
                        "type": "body",
                        "parameters": [
                                {
                                        "type": "text",
                                        "text": "33422388"
                                }
                        ]
                }
        ]
} )
response = client.messages.create(
        src="+14151112221",
        dst="+14151112222",
        type="whatsapp",
        template=template,
        url="https://foo.com/sms_status/"
    )
print(response)
#prints only the message_uuid
print(response.message_uuid)"

Replace the “auth” placeholders with your authentication credentials found on the Plivo console. 

Replace the phone number placeholders with the phone numbers you wish to use in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234). src is the phone number registered against your WABA.  dst  refers to the WhatsApp number that will receive the message. 

WhatsApp templates support four components: header,  body,  footer,  buttons. When sending messages, the template object you see in the code acts as a way to pass the dynamic parameters.  header can accommodate text or media (images, audio, video, documents) content. body can accommodate text content.  footer cannot have any dynamic variables. Plivo does not support sending dynamic parameters in buttons yet. 

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

$ python send_whatsappauthentication.py