Why

Our Engineering group chat reached the WhatsApp limit of 256 people, so new members were not able to join. So I decided to create a bot that would forward messages from WhatsApp to Discord. This would allow us to continue using WhatsApp and Discord at the same time.

Development

Chrome Extension

I decided to use a Chrome extension to get the WhatsApp messages. This was becuase WhatsApp web does not like having web scrapers (like puppeteer) on it. Chrome extensions are not blocked by WhatsApp web.

The extension is very simple, it awaits for a message to be sent in the group chat and then parses the message and sends it to the server.

Server/Bot

The server and bot are interworking. The server is a simple express server, once it recieves a message from the extension (via a POST request), it triggers the bot to send the message to Discord.