WAHA 2026.8 - Extend WAHA, Group Join Requests, Stickers
🛠️ Extend WAHA - Apps, Modules, Plugins
Want to add your own functionality to WAHA - an integration with an external product, a region-specific behavior, a metric, a low-level tweak in the message flow?
We’ve documented how to extend WAHA - four extension layers, ordered from the most preferred to the last resort - pick the highest layer that fits:
- 🧩 Apps - new functionality on top of WAHA, attached per session - like ChatWoot or Brazilian Phone Numbers.
- 📦 Modules - a product-wide capability, enabled and configured via environment variables - like Prometheus metrics or Webhooks.
- 🔌 Plugins - a low-level tweak of how requests and events flow through a session.
- 🏭 Engines - a new core WhatsApp feature or an engine fix.
The guide builds the same Message Logger feature at every layer, with real code - folder structure, registration points, lifecycle hooks, migrations and the Dashboard part.
Right now extending WAHA means sending a pull request to the official WAHA - a PR that keeps its changes inside an app, a module or a plugin gets reviewed fast and is likely to be accepted.
Later we’re planning a more extensive way to contribute, like n8n community nodes: you publish a @{scope}/waha-app-{name} or waha-module-{name} npm package, and WAHA discovers and enables it automatically.
Read more: 🛠️ Development
🧩 Apps: Brazilian Phone Numbers
Brazilian numbers (country code 55) have the 9th digit problem - the same contact exists with and without the extra 9, so messages end up in the wrong chat or get no reply at all.
