Setting up WhatsApp Telegram Bridge Using wat-bridge bot

Setting up WhatsApp Telegram Bridge using wat-bridge bot

WhatsApp as of now is not allowing user-bots at all. But a CLI library called Yowsup can do the tricks. It actually acts as a WhatsApp API. A user could register a mobile number with WhatsApp and chat using that number with Yowsup. We could also automate some messaging tasks this way and thus it becomes to act like a user-bot.

Rafael Medina (rmed) created a Telegram WhatsApp bridge using Yowsup and Telegram bot. You can find the wat-bridge repo here. This bot basically interacts with WhatsApp accounts and it could be used to bridge groups too.

Cons of wat-bridge

Can’t send media messages
Will not receive reply messages from Whatsapp
No username along with the WhatsApp message (You have to identify the user using mobile number instead, see the below section for more details)

Don’t worry, solution is here

A fork of wat-bridge is capable of solving the above-mentioned cons. This fork can overcome all the issues that the original bot has. The modified bot is available in the repository here. But getting media files from WhatsApp is in pre-alpha stage and you will need some additional works to do with the server.

How to Setup a Whatsapp Telegram bridge

if you are not capable of running your own bot I will suggest a working bot for you. follow this post in telegram channel

WhatsApp number, Telegrambot, Now go to this part of the tutorial to connect groups.

Let’s continue to build the bot

As the fork having more features but media file transfer isn’t in a good condition to test. So I am using the official repo here. You can also test the forked one if you are interested, it’s just that the cloning step is different.

First, create a Telegram bot by using @botfather. i.e. send /newsbot command to @botfather and then the botfather bot will give you a token number
Botfather
Clone the wat-bridge repository at https://github.com/rmed/wat-bridge.git
```
git clone https://github.com/rmed/wat-bridge.git
```
Enter the cloned directory
```
cd wat-bridge
```

Setup python virtual environment

virtualenv -p python3 venv
. venv/bin/activate

Install the required packages from requirements.txt
```
pip install -r requirements.txt
```

Install latest yowsup

git clone https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup.git
cd yowsup
# Install dependencies to build yowsup
sudo apt-get install ncurses-dev python3-dev
python setup.py install

Registering a number with yowsup

Now that we have installed yowsup, let’s register a phone number using yowsup.

NB: This number may get banned by WhatsApp, so use at your own risk! Also, don’t use your primary WhatsApp number for this, use a number which isn’t registered with WhatsApp yet.

Register a number

```
yowsup-cli registration --request sms --phone 49XXXXXXXX --cc 49 --mcc 123 --mnc 456
```
Provide phone number, CC, MCC & MCN. CC is the Country pre, you can know more about MCC and MNC from here. Now you will get an OTP to your number. Use that OTP in the next step for registration.
```
yowsup-cli registration --register 123456 --phone 49XXXXXXXX --cc 49
```
Now you will receive a password. Store this password anywhere securely.
Now let’s go to wat-bridge directory. Copy development.conf into another file
```
cp development.conf config.conf
```

Open config.conf in any text editor and change the parameters

[tg]
owner = ONWER_ID - this is the bot creator ID
token = TOKEN - Token got from @botfather

[wa]
phone = PHONE_NUMBER - registred phone number
password = PASSWORD - password obtained from yowsup registration

[db]
path = PATH_TO_DB - create a .db file in wat-bridge folder and give its path

Save and exit

Now run the bot

WAT_CONF=config.conf python watbridge.py

Yes, you are done! The bridge will be running now.

Bridge WhatsApp and Telegram groups

Add the Whatsapp number to required WhatsApp group and send any message
Add telegram bot in required telegram group send /me and copy the message get from bot
Go to your bot now you will get a message from the added Whatsapp group with a number in it (that number is WhatsApp group id)

/add  <group name> <that number from  step3>

/bind <group name> <number get from 2 step>

Now both groups are linked.

Bridge WhatsApp and Telegram groups using forked bot

Add the WhatsApp number to required WhatsApp group and send /getID
Now you will receive a message with random numbers starting with /link, copy that entire message
Add Telegram bot in respective Telegram group
Send the message received from WhatsApp group to Telegram group
Now both the groups should be linked and you are all done!

Cons of wat-bridge forked bot

Receiving messages from Telegram to large WhatsApp groups having more than 200 people will crash the bot
Latest pre contains media support which needs to be documented, for developers I suggest to checkout to previous commits for better results.

Bonus: You can also bridge Telegram with Riot (A popular Matrix client) as mentioned here!

15 thoughts on “Setting up WhatsApp Telegram Bridge Using wat-bridge bot”

Ncb says:
January 11, 2018 at 5:13 pm
Thanks for the info
jwsp1 says:
January 11, 2018 at 9:29 pm
I get an erroe when trying to do step 4
(Setup python virtual environment)
virtualenv -p python3 venv
. venv/bin/activate
it says command not found…. what can I do? Is there a video tutorial for the setup?
1. Mujeeb cpy says:
  January 11, 2018 at 11:03 pm
  You need to install pip and virtualenv. try pip install virtualenv
  1. jwsp1 says:
    January 12, 2018 at 4:44 am
    gives me this error: “bash: pip: command not found” :/
    1. Ranjith Siji says:
      January 12, 2018 at 11:29 am
      First you install pip for python before trying it.
      1. jwsp1 says:
        January 15, 2018 at 9:40 pm
        doesn’t work :/ it says:
        MYCOMPUTER MINGW64 ~/wat-bridge (master)
        $ virtualenv -p python3 venv
        bash: virtualenv: command not found
        MYCOMPUTER MINGW64 ~/wat-bridge (master)
        $ . venv/bin/activate
        bash: venv/bin/activate: No such file or directory
        I’m using Git Bash for Windows and just copy-paste the things written here but something is wrong…
        maybe the author thinks about recording a video tutorial…
      2. Mujeeb cpy says:
        January 16, 2018 at 10:57 am
        i am not familiar with windows workspace. i have used Gnu/linux. please use Gnu/linux and continue 🙂
SpEcHiDe says:
January 11, 2018 at 10:54 pm
Try to include Telegram comments plugin. ?????
jwsp1 says:
January 19, 2018 at 6:58 pm
wasn’t able to do this step:
cp development.conf config.conf
I copied the development.conf file manually and renamed it to config.conf. Is that correct?
Also, I can’t run the bot when I type WAT_CONF=config.conf python watbridge.py.
I told me:
“can’t open file ‘watbridge.py’: [Errno 2] No such file or directory”
I tried again, then it told me:
“Traceback (most recent call last):
File “watbridge.py”, line 35, in
from wat_bridge.static import SIGNAL_TG, SIGNAL_WA, init_bridge
ImportError: No module named ‘wat_bridge'”
Very strange…
1. Mujeeb cpy says:
  January 20, 2018 at 12:40 pm
  “can’t open file ‘watbridge.py’: [Errno 2] No such file or directory”
  Where did you run this command ? run ls see if there watbridge.py file. it is in the wat-bridge folder
Gal Rotem says:
December 31, 2019 at 6:36 pm
Hi Mujeeb, Thanks for sharing this. This bridge is still working or it was good for 2018?
Felix says:
March 31, 2020 at 9:59 am
sudo pip install wat_bridge … and you can replate wat_brigde when it said some module missing.
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