How to create a group in Python with the Wapito WhatsApp API

Before you start

• pip install requests
• os.environ["WAPITO_TOKEN"]
• A channel with a WhatsApp number linked to it, and its API token. Create one in the dashboard — the authentication guide shows where the token goes.

The whole script

Every step above in one runnable file. Save it as create-group.py, put your token in the environment, and run it.

"""Create Group with the Wapito WhatsApp API.

Create the group, read it back by id, publish the invite link, and let the participants webhook keep your database in step.

Run it with:
    export WAPITO_TOKEN="wpt_..."
    python create-group.py
"""
import os

import requests

BASE_URL = "https://api.wapito.com/v1"
TOKEN = os.environ["WAPITO_TOKEN"]

# --- Create the group ---
url = BASE_URL + "/groups"

payload = {
    "subject": "Acme Launch Team",
    "participants": ["+15551234567", "+15559876543"],
    "description": "Coordination for the Q3 launch. Keep it on topic."
}
headers = {
    "Authorization": "Bearer " + TOKEN,
    "Content-Type": "application/json"
}

response = requests.post(url, json=payload, headers=headers)

print(response.json())

# --- Read the group back ---
url = BASE_URL + "/groups/120363041234567890@g.us"

headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer " + TOKEN}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

print(response.json())

# --- Share the invite link ---
url = BASE_URL + "/groups/120363041234567890@g.us/invite"

headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer " + TOKEN}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

print(response.json())

Receive the webhook

FastAPI receiver for groups, groups.participants — it verifies the signature, answers immediately and does the work after. Install it with pip install fastapi uvicorn and save it as webhook.py.

import hashlib
import hmac
import os
import time

from fastapi import FastAPI, Header, HTTPException, Request

app = FastAPI()
SECRET = os.environ["WAPITO_WEBHOOK_SECRET"].encode()
EVENTS = ["groups", "groups.participants"]


def verify(raw: bytes, header: str | None) -> bool:
    """Checks the X-Wapito-Signature header: t=<ms>,v1=<hex hmac-sha256>."""
    if not header:
        return False
    parts = dict(p.split("=", 1) for p in header.split(",") if "=" in p)
    ts, sig = parts.get("t"), parts.get("v1")
    if not ts or not sig:
        return False
    if abs(time.time() * 1000 - int(ts)) > 300_000:  # 5 minute clock skew
        return False
    expected = hmac.new(SECRET, ts.encode() + b"." + raw, hashlib.sha256).hexdigest()
    return hmac.compare_digest(expected, sig)


@app.post("/wapito")
async def wapito(request: Request, signature: str | None = Header(default=None, alias="X-Wapito-Signature")):
    raw = await request.body()
    if not verify(raw, signature):
        raise HTTPException(status_code=401, detail="bad signature")
    payload = await request.json()
    if payload["event"] in EVENTS:
        print(payload["event"], payload["data"])
    return {"ok": True}  # answer 2xx fast; do the real work in a queue

Errors you may hit

• invalid_request (400)
• engine_error (502)
• unauthorized (401)

Gotchas

• requests does not raise on a 4xx by itself. Call response.raise_for_status() or check response.ok, otherwise a 429 send_rate_limited silently looks like a successful send and your loop keeps hammering the queue.
• json= and data= are not interchangeable. Pass json={...} so requests sets Content-Type: application/json and encodes UTF-8 for you; data= with a dict sends form encoding and the API answers 400 invalid_request.
• The default requests timeout is None, which means a stalled connection hangs your worker forever. Always pass timeout=(5, 30) and treat a read timeout as "maybe delivered" - re-check with the message id before you send again.
• A group id such as 120363000000000000@g.us is a string, not a number. Building it with an f-string from an int drops the precision and you get 404 not_found.
• Emoji and accented text need no extra work in Python 3, but reading a CSV of numbers with the default encoding on Windows will mangle them - open files with encoding="utf-8".

Where to run it

• Google Cloud Run (container, scale to zero, one revision per deploy)
• Render background worker for the sender, Render web service for the webhook receiver
• A 1 GB VPS with systemd for the worker and Caddy in front of the FastAPI receiver
• AWS Lambda + API Gateway for the webhook receiver only (the sender needs a long-lived process for queue spacing)

Pitfalls in Python

• Do not build the group id with an f-string from a number you parsed earlier: json.loads keeps it a str, but a pandas or sqlite round trip through an integer column rounds the digits and every later GET answers 404.
• requests reuses nothing between the three calls unless you create a requests.Session(); with a plain requests.post each call opens a fresh TLS connection, which is fine for one group and noticeably slow when you create fifty in a loop.
• If the participant list contains a number with spaces or a leading 00, Python will happily send it and the API will answer invalid_recipient; normalise with the phonenumbers package to E.164 before the post rather than catching the error afterwards.

Frequently asked questions

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