I'm having issues trying to download media files from the WhatsApp Business API. Following along with their documentation (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp/cloud-api/reference/media#download-media) they provide a cURL command that is successful in downloading a media file when used - however, the same request (I think) when done using NodeJS' fetch returns text/html responses with vague error wording and a 200 status code.

# Successful cURL: curl "https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/whatsapp_business/attachments/?mid=281274211304477&ext=1705672414&hash=ATtH6AOGFu0RqEpENicHUg8HCUkVfwGzfrHVCdiE7J8AUA" --header "Authorization: Bearer ..." 
// Successful cURL from child_process.exec: exec(   `curl --location "${mediaURL}" --header "Authorization: Bearer ..."` ); 
// Unsuccessful fetch: fetch(   "https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/whatsapp_business/attachments/?mid=281274211304477&ext=1705672414&hash=ATtH6AOGFu0RqEpENicHUg8HCUkVfwGzfrHVCdiE7J8AUA",   { headers: { Authorization: "Bearer ..." } } );

Suggestion from WhatsApp Cloud API Receiving Images from Users Error is also unsuccessful, unfortunately:

// Also unsuccessful fetch: fetch("https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/whatsapp_business/attachments/?mid=281274211304477&ext=1705672414&hash=ATtH6AOGFu0RqEpENicHUg8HCUkVfwGzfrHVCdiE7J8AUA", {   headers: {     Authorization: "Bearer ...",     "User-Agent": "curl/7.64.1",   }, })

Note: The lookaside.fbsbx.com URLs are all retrieved successfully from the WhatsApp Business APIs.

Per the documentation, a 404 error should occur if the link has expired, however, this isn't the case - and the access token hasn't expired either. Looking through the Community Forums, specifically https://developers.facebook.com/community/threads/1367000994138329/?join_id=f25971b6b4f9cc4, many conversations suggest that the User-Agent header should be spoofed - yet this doesn't seem to work either, although tweaking the User-Agent header within Postman yields varying results.

Successful in Postman:

Unsuccessful when User-Agent is adjusted in Postman:

Unsuccessful when User-Agent is removed in Postman:

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I was unable to use the Meta for Developers' "Report a bug" forms as support appears to be unavailable for WhatsApp Business APIs.

Also seen posts: 1, 2 on StackOverflow; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 on Meta Support Forums.

Tag:node.js, curl, facebook, whatsapp, whatsapp-cloud-api

2 comments.

  1. Jérémy

    Got the same issue.

    Using User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) seems to work for me.

    Reply
  2. Dom Webber

    What ended up working for me was swapping the fetch library. Swapping NodeJS native fetch for axios or using a ponyfill such as cross-fetch and setting the User-Agent header to "node";

    When using cross-fetch, the following fetch worked:

    import fetch from "cross-fetch"; fetch("https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/whatsapp_business/attachments/...", { headers: { Authorization: "Bearer ...", "User-Agent": "node", }, })

    Note: There is a very similar snippet in the original question, whilst the User-Agent has changed the fetch appeared to work with the same value too.

    Reply

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