WhatsClaude

Send a WhatsApp message, get a response from Claude. It runs on your machine, uses your Claude CLI, and works in whatever project directory you point it at.

What you need

• Node.js 18 or newer
• Claude CLI installed and logged in. If you haven't done this yet:

  npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
  claude  # run once to authenticate

• WhatsApp on your phone

Setup

git clone https://github.com/sisiphamus/whatsclaude.git
cd whatsclaude
npm install
npm start -- --project /path/to/your/project

That --project flag is how you tell Claude which folder to work in. If you're working on a React app at ~/Code/my-app, use that path. Claude will have full context of that codebase when responding.

What happens next

1. A QR code shows up in your terminal
2. On your phone: WhatsApp → Settings → Linked Devices → Link a Device → scan it
3. WhatsClaude creates a WhatsApp group named after your project folder (so if your project is my-app, the group is called "my-app")
4. Open that group on your phone and send a message
5. Claude responds right there in the chat

Only messages in that group go to Claude. Your other conversations are left alone.

How it actually works

You send a WhatsApp message
    → Baileys (WhatsApp Web library) picks it up
    → Your message gets piped to `claude --print` running in your project directory
    → Claude's response comes back
    → Gets sent as a WhatsApp reply

Baileys is the library that connects to WhatsApp Web. It's the same protocol the WhatsApp desktop app uses. You're linking a device to your account, same as you would with WhatsApp Web on a browser.

Images work too. Send a photo and Claude will analyze it.

If the server crashes mid-message, the message is queued to disk and retried when you restart.

Picking the project directory

You need to tell WhatsClaude where Claude should run. Two ways:

Pass it as a flag (good for switching between projects):

npm start -- --project ~/Code/my-app

Put it in config.json (good if you always use the same project):

{
  "projectDir": "/home/user/Code/my-app"
}

Save that file in the whatsclaude root directory. Then you can just run npm start.

The flag wins if you set both.

If you change the project directory, the WhatsApp group renames itself to match.

Configuration

Create a config.json in the project root if you want to change anything:

{
  "projectDir": "/path/to/your/project",
  "claudeCommand": "claude",
  "claudeArgs": ["--print"],
  "allowAllNumbers": true,
  "allowedNumbers": [],
  "prefix": "",
  "rateLimitPerMinute": 10,
  "maxResponseLength": 4000,
  "messageTimeout": 120000
}

Most of these you can leave alone. The ones worth knowing about:

• projectDir -- where Claude runs. Required.
• prefix -- if you set this to something like "!claude ", only messages starting with that prefix will trigger Claude. Useful if other people are in the group and you don't want every message going to Claude.
• allowedNumbers -- phone number whitelist. Only matters if you set allowAllNumbers to false.
• messageTimeout -- how long to wait for Claude before giving up, in milliseconds. Default is 2 minutes.

If you get logged out

Delete the auth_state/ folder and start over:

rm -rf auth_state/
npm start -- --project /path/to/your/project

You'll get a new QR code to scan.

Architecture

If you want to poke around the code:

src/
  index.js      -- entry point, validates setup, starts everything
  whatsapp.js   -- Baileys connection, QR auth, group creation, message routing
  handler.js    -- extracts text/images from messages, rate limiting, calls Claude
  claude.js     -- spawns `claude --print` as a subprocess, returns the output
  config.js     -- loads config.json, parses CLI args

whatsapp.js receives messages from Baileys, hands them to handler.js, which calls claude.js, and the response goes back through whatsapp.js to WhatsApp. Not much to it.

Messages are deduplicated by timestamp and ID (Baileys sometimes fires the same message twice). Bot-sent message IDs are tracked to prevent infinite loops. There's a message queue on disk so nothing gets lost if the process dies mid-response.

License

MIT