Example of preparing a server environment on the Ubuntu operating system#

After creating a machine for the server, you have to configure a firewall on it, install the necessary components and start up the server.

Ubuntu 20.04 and higher are supplied with Python 3 pre-installed . Update the system:

sudo apt update
sudo apt -y upgrade

You should set up firewall rules. In Ubuntu, the UFW firewall is installed by default, but if for some reason it is not installed, install it:

sudo apt install ufw

First, create the default firewall rules:

sudo ufw default deny incoming
sudo ufw default allow outgoing

If we activate the UFW firewall at this stage, all incoming connections will be denied. We should add rules to be able to connect via SSH after activating the firewall:

sudo ufw allow ssh

HTTP connections on port 80 that are used by non-encrypted web servers, use the command:

sudo ufw allow http

HTTP connections on port 443 that are used by encrypted web servers, use the command:

sudo ufw allow https

If your server has a public network interface named eth0, you can allow HTTP traffic (port 80) to that interface with the following command:

sudo ufw allow in on eth0 to any port 80

You can find the network interface name using the command:

ip addr

UFW firewall activation:

sudo ufw enable

Now our server can accept incoming requests on the port we have specified.

Install the pip package management system if the OS distribution doesn't contain it:

sudo apt install -y python3-pip

Now we can install our library.

Library installation:

pip3 install whatsapp-api-webhook-server-python

As an example, you can run our echo.py script on the server. It will output information on the received webhooks to the console:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/green-api/whatsapp-api-webhook-server-python/master/examples/echo.py
python3 echo.py