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I am creating a project using React and Express JS. Here, I try to send pdf to whatsapp using twilio, but it shows a few errors to show pdf and tells that I have to save pdf in public url. What I am expecting is to send pdf to Whatsapp by saving it in local server. Which software is best to send Whatsapp messages freely with pdf and image attachment?

What I have tried:

I tried to send pdf to whatsapp using twilio using React and Express but it is not showing pdf in Whatsapp which software I have to use to solve this issue.
Posted
Updated 5-Nov-23 0:20am
v2

There are two ways to upload PDFs to WhatsApp using their Business API. You either have to host the PDF in a public location, or you have to upload the PDF to the WhatsApp servers first, and then use that. If the POST message you send to WhatsApp uses a link type, that must be a public facing server location. If you want to follow the upload message route, behind the scenes, you will have to upload the message to WhatsApp[^], and then use the ID you get back from the upload in your POST message.

The WhatsApp documentation about this[^].

If you have to use Twilio, then your code is probably going to have to look something like this:
JavaScript
const express = require('express');
const twilio = require('twilio');

const app = express();

// Your Twilio Account SID and Auth Token
const accountSid = 'YOUR_TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID';
const authToken = 'YOUR_TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN';

// Create a Twilio client
const client = new twilio.TwilioClient({
  accountSid,
  authToken
});

// Create a route to handle PDF uploads
app.post('/upload-pdf', async (req, res) => {
  // Get the PDF file from the request
  const pdfFile = req.file('pdf');

  // Upload the PDF file to Twilio
  const pdfMedia = await client.media.create({
    content: pdfFile
  });

  // Get the URL of the uploaded PDF file
  const pdfUrl = pdfMedia.uri;

  // Send the PDF file to your customer
  await client.messages.create({
    body: 'Here is your PDF file:',
    mediaUrl: pdfUrl,
    to: req.body.toNumber
  });

  // Return a success response
  res.sendStatus(200);
});

// Start the Express server
app.listen(3000, () => {
  console.log('Server listening on port 3000');
});
Note: Code sourced from bard.google.com query.
 
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This is because Twilio requires the media file to be hosted on a publicly accessible URL to be sent through WhatsApp. To accomplish this, you can upload the PDF to a cloud storage service such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage and make it publicly accessible. Once the PDF is uploaded and accessible via a URL, you can provide this URL to Twilio's API for sending the WhatsApp message with the PDF attachment.
Other alternatives for sending WhatsApp messages with media attachments include:
1. Vonage (formerly Nexmo)
2. MessageBird
3. Infobip
4. WhatsApp Business API (Official API from WhatsApp, but it has specific requirements and is not free)
 
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