whatsmeow on Alpine Linux in Docker
Step by Step, ultra-simple and boring installation:
docker run -it golang:alpine3.18 /bin/ash
Install git and rlwrap (readline wrap)
apk --no-cache add git rlwrap gcc musl-dev sqlite-dev
cgo is required for sqlite and gcc is required for cgo and musl-dev is
required for dev :-)
Shallow clone the whatsmeow repository
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow
Go to the mdtest/ directory and build it with go
cd whatsmeow/mdtest
CGO_ENABLED=1 go build .
Then run it:
rlwrap ./mdtest
Authenticate
Add a device on your whatsapp app and scan the QR code to authenticate.
Quitting
Control-C then exit the shell
Starting it Again
Find the name of the container (a random name will be assigned by docker) it
will have Exited now since it terminated in "Quitting":
docker ps -a
Start the container interactively:
docker start -i fervent_franklin
Go to the correct directory and run the application again
cd whatsmeow/mdtest
rlwrap ./mdtest
This time the application should use the previously stored authentication details to login to whatsapp.
Further Work
You might have guessed that this is quite inefficient since the result is an
image with gcc and all the dev headers that were required when building but
are not required to execute mdtest.
Infact very little is required now to execute mdtest and so a much smaller
container may be used. The location of mdtest:
ls $(docker inspect fervent_franklin -f '{{.GraphDriver.Data.MergedDir}}')/go/whatsmeow/mdtest
Copy it out and it will probably work on the host, if not can be copied into
another Alpine container with SQLite libs and rlwrap. No need for the
golang container.
Further experimentation is left to the reader :-)