Message History

WhatsApp has no REST history API, so raw-Baileys adapters return empty arrays. This adapter implements fetchMessages for real, backed by the Zaileys message store  — every message the client sees is persisted and queryable.

Fetching

const recent = await thread.fetchMessages({ limit: 50 })
// recent.messages — chronological (oldest → newest), full Message objects
 
const older = await thread.fetchMessages({ limit: 50, cursor: recent.nextCursor })

• Pagination is backward (newest first, cursor moves to older messages) — the natural direction for chat views. direction: 'forward' throws a ValidationError since the store paginates by before-timestamp only.
• nextCursor is omitted when there is nothing older.
• fetchChannelMessages delegates to fetchMessages (a WhatsApp chat has no channel/thread split).
• fetchMessage(threadId, messageId) looks up a single stored message.

History messages are parsed from stored WAMessages — text, captions, author, and timestamps are populated; the live MessageContext (zaileysContext) is only present on real-time messages.

Depth = your store

History depth equals what your Zaileys store has seen. The in-memory default forgets on restart — give the client a durable adapter:

import { Client, SqliteMessageStore } from 'zaileys'
 
const client = new Client({
  sessionId: 'main',
  store: new SqliteMessageStore({ database: './wa.db' }),
})
const whatsapp = createZaileysAdapter({ client })

Available backends: memory (default), sqlite, redis, postgres, convex — see Zaileys → Storage Adapters .

Media rehydration

When you use queue / debounce / burst concurrency, the SDK serializes messages — normally destroying attachment download closures. The adapter implements rehydrateAttachment: it stores the message key in fetchMetadata and rebuilds fetchData on rehydration, re-downloading media through client.downloadMedia(key) from the store.

const bot = new Chat({
  adapters: { whatsapp },
  state: myState,
  concurrency: 'queue', // attachments still download after dequeue
  /* … */
})