Session Disconnected

[kashif-raza]

How we can make session alive or auto reconnect if it is disconnected so no humain intervention needed

[rmyndharis]

Hi @kashif-raza — good news: auto-reconnect is built in and on by default, and we've hardened it significantly in recent releases (v0.10.0+). You shouldn't need any human intervention to keep a session alive.

What's already in place

• Auto-reconnect on disconnect — when WhatsApp's multi-device connection drops (network blip, server-side rotation, browser crash), the engine automatically attempts to reconnect.
• Dead-browser detection (whatsapp-web.js engine) — a crashed or hung Chromium is detected through Puppeteer lifecycle handles and routed through the standard disconnect → reconnect pipeline.
• Session watchdog — a background probe checks every READY session every 60 seconds. Two consecutive failed probes are treated as a disconnect and trigger a reconnect.
• Unlimited reconnect budget — retries continue indefinitely with exponential backoff (capped at 1 hour between attempts, counter reset after 5 stable minutes). Previously the engine gave up after 5 attempts.
• Auto-start on boot — set AUTO_START_SESSIONS=true in your .env (already the default in docker-compose.dev.yml) so authenticated sessions come back by themselves after a container restart.

If reconnect isn't working for you

Please share:

1. Your OpenWA version (docker exec openwa-api cat package.json | jq .version, or the image tag).
2. The engine (ENGINE_TYPE=whatsapp-web.js or baileys).
3. Logs around the disconnect: docker logs openwa-api --since 2h | grep -iE 'disconnect|reconnect|watchdog|error'.

That'll let us see whether the watchdog is firing and what the engine is reporting. On the latest version (v0.10.2), brief disconnects should self-heal without any manual action. 🙂