Best Practice

Since this is not an officially sanctioned solution it is temperamental to say the least. Here are some best practices:

1. Keep the session alive
2. Offload most work off of your @open-wa/wa-automate setup (i.e forward all events to a pubsub or something)
3. Keep the phone nearby just in case you need to reauthenticate
4. Use a chrome instance instead of the default chromium instance
5. Use headless: false for easy & quick visual debugging
6. Implement the unread messages functionality on creation of a session so you don't miss any messages upon any downtime.
7. Implement a promise-queue
8. Use a unique and valid custom user-agent
9. await all @open-wa/wa-automate methods just in case
10. Do not run your s@open-wa/wa-automate instance on a Windows machine.
11. Always kill the session safely upon error or SIGINT.
12. Regularly restart your process to manage memory consumption
13. If memory leaks continue to be an issue then use cacheEnabled:false in the config to disable the cache on the page.

import { create, Client} from '@open-wa/wa-automate';
const { default: PQueue } = require("p-queue");

const queue = new PQueue({
  concurrency: 4,
  autoStart:false
   });

const proc = async message => {
  //do something with the message here
    console.log(message)
    return true;
}

const processMessage = message => queue.add(()=>proc(message));

async function start(client: Client) {
  const unreadMessages = await client.getAllUnreadMessages();
  unreadMessages.forEach(processMessage)
  ...
  await client.onMessage(processMessage);
  queue.start();
}

create().then(client => start(client));

//create takes 1 argument and that is the config object :
// https://docs.openwa.dev/interfaces/api_model_config.ConfigObject.html

create({
  // For Mac:
  executablePath: '/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome',
  // For Windows:
  // executablePath: 'C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Google\\Chrome\\Application\\chrome.exe',
  headless: false,
  autoRefresh:true,
  cacheEnabled:false,
  customUserAgent: 'some custom user agent'
})
.then(client => start(client));