In these articles we are going to see how to develope our Whatsapp Online Tracker, a simple application written in Python for getting an alert everytime a Whatsapp contact is online.

In the first part we present a possible approach in order to solve the problem and how to install everything needed for getting the job done!

In the second part we focus on how put the ingredients together and realize a simple tracker.

Whatsapp Web

Well, as introduced our goal is to gather information about a Whatsapp contact in order to be notified when he/she opens and checks his/her messages.

In order to do that we have to find a tool that allows us to automate those actions so that we can replicate them within an application.

Whatsapp Web is what we need, infact it is an interface for interacting with our chats using any PC.

Let’s open the Whatsapp Web page and let’s pair our smartphone via the QRCode shown on the page.

Once you have done, we have access to the main interface which is something like that:

Let’s say we’d like to check the status of a specific user, what we have to do is to open a New chat using the button shown in red:

now we have to insert either the phone number or the name of the contact we want to interact with and click on the first element that appears under the textbox:

doing that we are able to open a chat with the contact and visualize its current state:

Well, we have found a sequence of steps which allows to verify the online status of any contact!

Now we need to find a way to automate those steps!

Selenium for Python

We already met Selenium and we discussed on how to install it on Raspberry Pi.

We probably know that this is a framework used for testing Web application but can be used for a lot more, even for our tracker!

Intalling Selenium for Python is simple thanks to the pip installer.

Let’s open our prompt and, using admin privileges, launch:

This way we update our pip installer and we install the last Selenium version.

Installing WebDriver

In order to let Selenium working properly we must install a driver compatible with our browser.

Let’s open this page and below the Drivers section let’s choose the link corresponding to the browser installed in our system.

Once downloaded, unzip the content in a folder of your choice.

Hello World!

Now we have all the ingredients for developing our application.
Firstly, let’s verify to have everything well configured.

Using our IDE, let’s create a Python script which imports Selenium and creates an object called browser pointing to the WebDriver recently downloaded.

The script terminates opening a browser windows and loading the Google homepage.

Here the code discussed:

Let’s save the script, calling it test.py.

Now, open a prompt from the same folder in which we saved the script and execute the following command:

You should now see a browser window opening and loading the Google homepage.

XPath Selectors

Ok, now we are ready to interact with our browser.

We need just to solve another issue: how to simulate clicks and keyboard typing on the elements of a web page?

Since Selenium works with Web app, it allows to refer to an element on the page through its XPath selector: I would say that it is perfect for what we need!

Starting from the Whatsapp Web page, using ChroPath a tool already seen in this article, we collect the absolut paths for any element we need.

At the time of writing:

Conclusions

Perfect, at this point we have everything we need to be able to develop our Whatsapp Online Tracker.

We have understood that to monitor a contact is necessary to have an active Whatsapp account and, using the Web service, it is possible to view the current status of any user simply by searching for it and opening a chat.

We also saw that with Selenium and XPath it is possible to automate all these operations through a Python script.

In the next article we will see how to put all those ingredients together in order to achive the desidered results!