How to leave 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 leave-group.py, put your token in the environment, and run it.

"""Leave Group with the Wapito WhatsApp API.

List what you are in, hand over the creator role if you hold it, leave, and archive your record when the webhook confirms it.

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

import requests

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

# --- Find the groups to leave ---
url = BASE_URL + "/groups"

querystring = {"count":"50","offset":"0"}

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

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

print(response.json())

# --- Hand over first if you are the creator ---
url = BASE_URL + "/groups/120363041234567890@g.us"

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

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

print(response.json())

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

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

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

print(response.status_code)

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

• feature_not_available (501)
• token_revoked (401)
• not_found (404)

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

• shutil.rmtree of an export folder in a finally block runs even when the leave call raised, so a failed run deletes the only copy of the transcript; move cleanup after a successful archive check instead, and keep the export until the webhook has confirmed the departure.
• Iterating groups while calling /leave inside the same generator that pages the list can skip entries as the list shifts under you; materialise the ids into a list first, then leave, and re-read the list once at the end to report what remains.
• A script that reads the group ids from a CSV with the csv module gets them as strings, but a quick fix through pandas turns a column of ids into floats and the path /groups/1.2e17/leave answers 404 not_found; keep dtype=str for that column or skip pandas entirely for a list this small.

Frequently asked questions

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