baileyrs

A Rust-powered WhatsApp Web library for JavaScript, with a Baileys-compatible API.

How it works

baileyrs is a thin JavaScript wrapper over whatsapp-rust compiled to WebAssembly. The heavy lifting — Signal protocol, Noise handshake, media encryption, binary-node (de)serialization, protobuf codec — runs in Rust/WASM via the whatsapp-rust-bridge package.

The public surface intentionally mirrors Baileys so existing integrations can migrate with minimal changes. See ATTRIBUTION.md for details.

vs. Baileys

| Area | Original Baileys | baileyrs | |---|---|---| | Signal Protocol | JS (libsignal) | Rust/WASM | | Media encrypt/decrypt | Node.js crypto | Rust AES-256-CBC + HMAC | | Media upload/download | JS fetch + temp files | Rust with CDN failover, auth refresh, resumable upload | | Key management | JS auth state | Rust PersistenceManager | | Auto-reconnect | Manual startSock() loop | Transient drops retried in Rust (fibonacci backoff); terminal ones still yours |

Compatibility is checked rather than assumed: a declaration audit against upstream's .d.ts, a wire-fidelity audit of the send path, ~50 behavioural compatibility suites, and a differential fuzz suite that generates its own inputs from the proto schema and compares the two libraries directly. Differences the fuzzers find are recorded with a reason and a review date, and known open ones are listed in src/__fuzz__/harness/divergence.ts.

Documentation

The full API reference and guides live in the baileyrs wiki — sending messages and media, groups, privacy, newsletters, custom stores, socket configuration, error handling, memory monitoring, and more.

Installation

Requires Node.js 22 or newer.

New project

npm install @oxidezap/baileyrs

import makeWASocket from '@oxidezap/baileyrs'

Drop-in replacement for upstream Baileys

baileyrs is API-compatible with @whiskeysockets/baileys. Existing projects switch over by aliasing the package — the API and imports need no source changes. Two things do:

• Carrying an existing pairing across takes a one-line import swap, see Migrating from Upstream Baileys.
• If your connection.update handler was written for a version of baileyrs before 0.1, see Gotchas: a close now always means the socket is finished, and you have to recreate it. Code written against upstream Baileys already does the right thing.

npm install @whiskeysockets/baileys@npm:@oxidezap/baileyrs

That writes the alias to your package.json (with the latest version at install time):

{
  "dependencies": {
    "@whiskeysockets/baileys": "npm:@oxidezap/baileyrs@^x.x.x"
  }
}

Every import { makeWASocket } from '@whiskeysockets/baileys' in your codebase now resolves to baileyrs.

Quick Start

import makeWASocket, { Boom, DisconnectReason, useMultiFileAuthState } from '@oxidezap/baileyrs'

const { state } = await useMultiFileAuthState('auth_info')

// setTimeout caps at ~2^31-1 ms (~24.8 days) and fires immediately past that,
// so a long ban has to be waited out in chunks.
async function waitUntil(deadlineMs: number) {
    for (let left = deadlineMs - Date.now(); left > 0; left = deadlineMs - Date.now()) {
        await new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, Math.min(left, 2_147_483_647)))
    }
}

async function connectToWhatsApp() {
    const sock = makeWASocket({ auth: state })

    sock.ev.on('connection.update', ({ connection, lastDisconnect }) => {
        if (connection === 'close') {
            // `close` means this socket is finished — same as upstream Baileys.
            // Transient drops never get here; the Rust engine retries those and
            // reports `connecting`.
            const statusCode = (lastDisconnect?.error as Boom)?.output?.statusCode
            // See the reconnect table under Gotchas: a few terminal closes
            // reject the replacement just as fast, so they are not worth
            // retrying — or not yet. `Example/example.ts` has the full policy.
            if (statusCode === DisconnectReason.loggedOut || statusCode === 405) {
                console.log('Closed for good', statusCode)
            } else if (statusCode === DisconnectReason.forbidden) {
                // Temporary ban: `expire` is unix seconds. A missing or past
                // expiry means the ban is over — reconnect like any other
                // terminal close rather than staying offline forever.
                const expire = (lastDisconnect?.error as Boom)?.data?.expire
                console.log('Temporarily banned until', expire)
                waitUntil(typeof expire === 'number' ? expire * 1000 : 0).then(connectToWhatsApp)
            } else {
                setTimeout(connectToWhatsApp, 5_000)
            }
        }
        if (connection === 'open') {
            console.log('Connected')
        }
    })

    // Register every handler in here. A replacement socket is a new emitter,
    // so anything attached outside stops firing after the first reconnect.
    sock.ev.on('messages.upsert', ({ messages }) => {
        for (const msg of messages) {
            console.log('received message', msg.key.id)
        }
    })

    return sock
}

const sock = await connectToWhatsApp()
await sock.sendMessage('[email protected]', { text: 'Hello!' })

Migrating from Upstream Baileys

baileyrs accepts the upstream auth: { creds, keys } shape directly — the internal wrapLegacyStore adapter runs automatically when it sees that shape, so the makeWASocket(...) call site needs zero changes:

// makeWASocket() works as-is once the npm alias is in place.
// Auto-wrap kicks in when it sees {creds, keys}.
const sock = makeWASocket({ auth: state })

sock.ev.on('creds.update', saveCreds)  // still fires — adapter re-emits

The one switch you do make is how you load state. baileyrs's useMultiFileAuthState is a new-state-only helper: it provisions a binary .bin store for the Rust engine and ignores any pre-existing upstream JSON. To carry an existing pairing across the migration, swap the import to useLegacyMultiFileAuthState (one line):

- import makeWASocket, { useMultiFileAuthState } from '@whiskeysockets/baileys'
+ import makeWASocket, { useLegacyMultiFileAuthState as useMultiFileAuthState } from '@whiskeysockets/baileys'

  const { state, saveCreds } = await useMultiFileAuthState('auth_info')
  const sock = makeWASocket({ auth: state })
  sock.ev.on('creds.update', saveCreds)

Same approach works for any custom upstream auth (useMySQLAuthState, useRedisAuthState, mysql-baileys, etc.) — your loader keeps returning {creds, keys, saveCreds}, baileyrs auto-wraps it on the way in.

Existing sessions migrate without re-pairing: useLegacyMultiFileAuthState reads the existing creds.json + pre-key-*.json / session-*.json files from the same folder upstream Baileys was using and hands them to the Rust engine. Pair-ID, identity, signed pre-keys, and Signal sessions are all preserved. No QR re-scan, no logged-out events.

Where the new state goes: baileyrs continues to write the legacy JSON files (via saveCreds) so the folder stays compatible with both sides during a rollback window. The Rust engine treats the JSON as the source of truth as long as you keep using useLegacyMultiFileAuthState. One edge case: a Signal session imported while it still had pending out-of-order message gaps becomes native-only on its first write-back — after a rollback, that one session re-establishes itself through a fresh Signal handshake (automatic; no re-pairing, other sessions unaffected). If you later want to drop the JSON layer, switch to useMultiFileAuthState — but that path requires a fresh QR.

Gotchas

A few behaviors that differ from upstream — almost always to your advantage:

• Auto-reconnect is built in, but close still means close. The Rust engine retries transient drops on a fibonacci backoff and reports them as connection: 'connecting', so the canonical upstream handler never fires for those and you never end up with two sockets on one account. A connection: 'close' is only emitted once the engine has given up — a replaced session, an outdated build, a temporary ban, an unrecoverable <failure> — and by then the socket has already released its resources. Ignoring it leaves the bot permanently offline, so handle it the upstream way and build a replacement — with three exceptions, because some of those failures reject the replacement just as fast:

  | statusCode | what to do | | --- | --- | | DisconnectReason.loggedOut (401) | stop; needs a fresh pairing | | 405 | stop; the server rejected this build, and the next one too | | DisconnectReason.forbidden (403) | wait until lastDisconnect.error.data.expire (unix seconds) — it is a temporary ban | | anything else | reconnect, after a short delay |

  Example/example.ts implements exactly this.

• connecting is not a short state here. The engine's backoff grows with each consecutive failure, so a single connecting can stand for minutes of downtime with nothing else emitted in between. See When connecting lasts minutes: a readiness timeout written for upstream's connecting misreads this one.

• No getMessage / cachedGroupMetadata polyfill required. The Rust side caches group metadata and message keys natively, and nothing here calls either hook: a cachedGroupMetadata carried over from upstream never runs, and neither does a getMessage. Passing them is harmless — the whole SocketConfig shape is accepted so a migration needs no edits — but they are not overrides, so delete them rather than maintain them. Every socket warns once at construction naming any option in that group it received; that list is the authority — the type system requires each SocketConfig member to be classified, so it cannot fall behind — and it also covers keepAliveIntervalMs, markOnlineOnConnect, maxMsgRetryCount, msgRetryCounterCache, retryRequestDelayMs, fireInitQueries, syncFullHistory, shouldSyncHistoryMessage, generateHighQualityLinkPreview, linkPreviewImageThumbnailWidth, enableAutoSessionRecreation, enableRecentMessageCache, appStateMacVerification, patchMessageBeforeSending, customUploadHosts, countryCode, connectTimeoutMs, qrTimeout, printQRInTerminal, ignoreOfflineMessages, downloadHistory, agent, fetchAgent, mobile, mediaCache, userDevicesCache, callOfferCache and placeholderResendCache.

• Boom ships in the box. baileyrs exports its own @hapi/boom-compatible Boom, so the existing (err as Boom).output.statusCode pattern works unchanged. If your package.json was pulling @hapi/boom only for baileys, you can drop the dependency.

• Your key store also holds bridge state, so "empty" is not "unpaired". See Bridge state in your key store — this one can break a boot path, so it has its own section.

When connecting lasts minutes

Upstream Baileys emits connecting once per socket, and it resolves to open or close within seconds, because upstream never retries on its own. On baileyrs the same value also covers every drop the engine is retrying, and the backoff between those retries climbs with each consecutive failure.

Here is what that costs on a rate-limited account. Four consecutive 429 rate-overlimit, measured against the production reconnect path:

| failure | next attempt in | offline so far | | --- | --- | --- | | 429 #1 | 8.4s | 8.4s | | 429 #2 | 146.2s | 154.6s | | 429 #3 | 813.9s | 968.5s | | 429 #4 | 903.5s | 1872.0s |

About 16 minutes offline once the third retry delay has run, and about 31 once the fourth has. For all of it the consumer sees exactly one connection: 'connecting': no lastDisconnect, no status code, no repeat. isConnected and isLoggedIn are both false throughout, exactly as they are during a first connection, so neither tells you a retry is scheduled.

Do not arm a readiness timeout on connecting, and above all do not restart the process when one expires. The backoff counter lives in the Rust client that your socket owns, so it dies with the process. The next boot starts a new attempt immediately, replays the whole startup burst against a server that just asked for less traffic, and earns the next 429 sooner. Restarting is the single worst answer to a rate limit, and an upstream-shaped readiness timeout leads straight to it.

What to do instead:

• Treat open and close as the only decision points. connecting carries no failure to react to, and it is never a reason to build a second socket. Only close is.
• Read connecting in context: after an open it means the engine is retrying a drop it owns and will keep retrying; with no open before it, it is a first connection still being established. Neither one is stuck.
• If you need a liveness watchdog anyway, budget it well past the ladder above, tens of minutes rather than seconds, and have it alert a human instead of killing the process. A shorter one fires on a backoff that was about to succeed.
• Know what your own calls do meanwhile. A call issued while the engine is reconnecting no longer fails fast: it parks and goes out when the connection lands, which on the ladder above can be tens of minutes. That is the point, since the alternative was an error indistinguishable from a finished session, but it means a call you issue during connecting is a call you are committing to. Racing it against your own deadline bounds your waiting and not the work: the call still goes out when the reconnect lands, so a retry after the deadline sends it twice unless you pinned messageId.
• Fix the cause on your side: send less. The engine restores the connection, but it does not pace your traffic, and the traffic is what earned the 429. Queueing, throttling and deferral are yours to decide, the same as upstream.

Bridge state in your key store

Upstream Baileys keeps engine state in creds (persisted by saveCreds) and puts only Signal key material in keys. baileyrs uses that same keys store as the persistence channel for the Rust core's own state as well: its device record, and the byte-level records the Signal namespaces are projected from. Those live under namespaces reserved with the bridge- prefix:

| namespace | what it holds | | --- | --- | | bridge-native-* | the core's own encoding of a namespace that also has a Baileys projection (bridge-native-session, bridge-native-prekey, bridge-native-device, …) | | bridge-* | core records with no Baileys equivalent (bridge-signed-prekey, bridge-sent-message, bridge-msg-secret, bridge-meta, …) |

No upstream Baileys namespace starts with bridge-, and none of your data is stored under one. Which of them you actually see depends on what the engine touches; bridge-native-device shows up first, because the core reads its device record while the socket is still connecting — before any QR, before any pairing.

That last point is the one that bites. A store that counted rows to decide whether this was a first run reports a session that does not exist:

// WRONG on baileyrs: bridge-native-device is already in the table before pairing,
// so this never reports empty again — the bot skips its pairing flow and hangs.
const isEmpty = () => !creds.registered && !creds.me?.id && countKeys() === 0

// Right, on baileyrs and upstream alike: creds are the pairing record.
const isEmpty = () => !creds.registered && !creds.me?.id

A non-empty key store is not evidence of a session. creds.registered and creds.me?.id are, and they are the only thing to check.

When you need to present a store the way upstream would — counting rows, listing the Signal namespaces, exporting an upstream-shaped dump — filter the bridge rows out with the exported classifier rather than matching the prefix yourself. It is derived from the internal routing catalog, so a namespace added in a later release is covered without you changing anything:

// Aliased install? Import from '@whiskeysockets/baileys' instead; it resolves here.
import { BRIDGE_INTERNAL_KEY_TYPES, isBridgeInternalKeyType } from '@oxidezap/baileyrs'

isBridgeInternalKeyType('bridge-native-device') // true
isBridgeInternalKeyType('pre-key')              // false

// Every bridge-internal namespace, e.g. for a SQL `NOT IN (...)` clause. The
// store also holds the Baileys namespaces the engine projects into it.
BRIDGE_INTERNAL_KEY_TYPES

Do not drop these rows from a backup or a store-to-store move. They are effective state, not metadata. bridge-signed-prekey, bridge-sender-key-devices, bridge-base-key, bridge-sent-message, bridge-msg-secret, bridge-mutation-mac and bridge-meta have no Baileys projection at all, and a Signal session that turned native-only lives under bridge-native-session alone. Restoring only the non-bridge rows rolls those sessions back or loses the state outright. Filter the bridge rows only where the destination is an upstream-shaped view that cannot represent them; a full backup, or a move between two baileyrs stores, carries every bridge- row across.

This applies to stores you own — the upstream { creds, keys } shape that baileyrs auto-wraps, including useLegacyMultiFileAuthState. It does not apply to useMultiFileAuthState, whose keys is a projection over the engine's own store; the bridge- namespaces never surface through it.

The move back down is not symmetric either. From 0.2.8 on, the core buffers a skipped-message key as its seed alone, where an earlier release wrote the derived cipher/mac/iv triple beside it. Forward is fine — a record written before this carries both, and the newer engine reads it unchanged. Backward is not: an older engine cannot parse a record whose skipped keys carry no triple, and it fails on the whole record, not on the one key.

Where that bites depends on which bytes the engine is handed, and a wrapped store is not automatically on the safe side of it. It holds the Baileys projection, which has only ever held seeds — but it also mirrors the core's exact bytes under bridge-native-session, and a read prefers that mirror for as long as its fingerprint still matches the projection. A downgrade can therefore be handed the newer record with a perfectly readable projection sitting right beside it.

Dropping a mirror row makes the next read rebuild it from the projection, which is the format both versions agree on — but only for a session that has one. A session that turned native-only lives in that row alone, so dropping that one loses the session outright, which is the case the warning above is about. A session with no skipped keys buffered at the time is unaffected either way: the difference only exists while a chain is holding keys for messages that arrived out of order.

Disclaimer

This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected to WhatsApp LLC or Meta Platforms, Inc. "WhatsApp" is a trademark of its respective owners. baileyrs is an unofficial, community-driven library provided for educational and interoperability purposes.

Use at your own risk. The authors are not responsible for any misuse, account bans, or violations of WhatsApp's Terms of Service that may result from the use of this software.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.