Subscribe to and broadcast WhatsApp presence updates

Track whether contacts are online, typing, or recording using Baileys presence subscriptions. Learn sock.presenceSubscribe and the presence.update event.

Presence in WhatsApp describes what another user is currently doing: whether they are online, typing a message, recording an audio clip, or have gone inactive. Baileys lets you both subscribe to presence updates from other contacts and broadcast your own presence to them.

Presence states

State	Meaning
available	The user is online and active
unavailable	The user is offline or the app is in background
composing	The user is typing a message
recording	The user is recording a voice message
paused	The user started typing but stopped

Subscribe to presence updates

Call presenceSubscribe with a chat JID to request that WhatsApp start sending you presence notifications for that chat. You then listen for the presence.update event to receive the data.

// the presence update is fetched and called here
sock.ev.on('presence.update', console.log)

// request updates for a chat
await sock.presenceSubscribe(jid)

Full subscribe and listen pattern

import makeWASocket from '@whiskeysockets/baileys'

// Subscribe to presence for a contact or group
await sock.presenceSubscribe(jid)

// Listen for incoming presence updates
sock.ev.on('presence.update', ({ id, presences }) => {
    // id is the JID of the chat (contact or group)
    for (const [participant, data] of Object.entries(presences)) {
        console.log(
            `${participant} in ${id}:`,
            data.lastKnownPresence,   // WAPresence value
            'last seen:', data.lastSeen
        )
    }
})

The event payload has the shape:

{
    id: string,            // JID of the chat
    presences: {
        [participantJid: string]: {
            lastKnownPresence: WAPresence,  // current presence state
            lastSeen?: number               // unix timestamp, when available
        }
    }
}

For group chats, presences is a map of individual participant JIDs to their presence data. For one-on-one chats, it will contain a single entry for the contact.

Broadcast your own presence

Use sendPresenceUpdate to tell WhatsApp what you are currently doing. You can optionally scope it to a specific chat JID; omitting jid broadcasts to all open subscriptions.

await sock.sendPresenceUpdate('available', jid)

The available WAPresence values are:

Value	When to use
available	Your client is active and the user is present
unavailable	Your client is idle or the user has left the app
composing	The user is typing in the given chat
recording	The user is recording a voice message in the chat
paused	The user stopped typing without sending

Presence updates expire after approximately 10 seconds. If you want to sustain a composing indicator, you must call sendPresenceUpdate repeatedly.

Receiving push notifications on the phone

When your Baileys client is marked as available, WhatsApp treats it as an active desktop session and suppresses push notifications to the paired phone. If you want the phone to keep receiving push notifications, mark your client as offline on connect:

const sock = makeWASocket({
    markOnlineOnConnect: false
})

Alternatively, explicitly send an unavailable presence after connecting:

await sock.sendPresenceUpdate('unavailable')