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How to set up a RapidPro integration

Manish Manohar Updated by Manish Manohar

Integrations are a great way to connect external tools with Turn. One of the default integration that Turn provides is with RapidPro. 

RapidPro vs Textit
RapidPro and Textit is the same product. Textit is hosted for you and you pay for that hosting whereas RapidPro is the open source version that you need to host yourself.

It's a bit of a back and forth between the two products - like any good friendship it needs to be a mutual effort 😉

Before you start

IMPORTANT: Wait until Turn confirms that your number is fully onboarded and your billing is set up. If you start wiring things together before that, the channel will connect but messages won't flow — and that's a confusing place to debug from.

Let’s go through the set up steps:

Step 1: Create the channel in RapidPro

  1. Log in to RapidPro and, in the top right corner, click on your organisation's display name to go to the settings page.
  2. Click New Channel.
  3. Select Turn.io WhatsApp as the channel type.

Leave this form open — you're about to go and fetch the credentials that fill it in.

Step 2: Get your credentials from Turn

  1. Open turn.io in another tab and log in to your account.
  2. Go to the Settings page and then to the API & Webhooks section.
  1. Click Generate Credentials.
  2. Keep this pop-up window open — you're going to copy and paste these details into RapidPro in a moment.

IMPORTANT: Every time you click Generate Credentials the system generates new credentials for your account and the old ones expire. So make sure you save these credentials somewhere you can retrieve them again.

Step 3: Paste the credentials into RapidPro

  1. Head back to your RapidPro tab, where the Turn.io channel form is waiting.
  2. Copy the values from the Turn pop-up into the matching fields on the form.

  1. Click Submit.

You're over the hump! 🙌 One more hop back to Turn.

Step 4: Give Turn the webhook URL

Right now RapidPro knows how to talk to Turn, but Turn doesn't yet know where to send incoming messages. Let's fix that.

  1. Once the channel is created, RapidPro shows you a URL for it. Copy that URL.

  1. Go back to Turn > Settings > API & Webhooks and paste the URL into the Webhooks section.

  1. Save.

Now the conversation goes both ways.

Step 5: Test it

Don't skip this bit — the order matters.

  1. Send an inbound message first. Message your WhatsApp line from your own phone. This is what opens the conversation and tells RapidPro that this contact exists.
  2. Then send an outbound test message from RapidPro back to that same number.

Your integration is now completed. Now Turn and RapidPro are friends 👭

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