PDFs

With Browserbase, you can work with PDFs in a few ways:

1. Generate: Create PDFs from web pages with Playwright’s page.pdf() method.
2. Download: Auto-download PDFs to Browserbase’s cloud storage by opening a PDF URL. To retrieve them, see our Downloads documentation.
3. View: Display PDFs in the browser, instead of downloading them, by setting the enablePdfViewer property in your browser settings.

Generate PDFs

After creating and connecting to a session, here’s how to generate a PDF from a web page using Playwright:

Node.js

Playwright

import { chromium } from "playwright-core";
import { Browserbase } from "@browserbasehq/sdk";

(async () => {
  console.log("Starting remote browser...");
  const bb = new Browserbase({ apiKey: process.env.BROWSERBASE_API_KEY });
  const session = await bb.sessions.create({
    projectId: process.env.BROWSERBASE_PROJECT_ID,
  });

  const browser = await chromium.connectOverCDP(session.connectUrl);
  const defaultContext = browser.contexts()[0];
  const page = defaultContext.pages()[0];

  await page.goto("https://news.ycombinator.com");

  console.log("Generating PDF...");

  await page.pdf({
    path: "webpage.pdf",
    format: "A4",
  });

  console.log("Shutting down...");
  await page.close();
  await browser.close();
})().catch((error) => {
  console.error(error);
});

Download PDFs

When you navigate to a PDF URL, Browserbase automatically downloads the PDF file and cancels the navigation. The downloaded PDF is stored in Browserbase’s cloud storage for later retrieval.

Node.js

Playwright

import { chromium } from "playwright-core";
import { Browserbase } from "@browserbasehq/sdk";

(async () => {
  console.log("Starting remote browser...");
  const bb = new Browserbase({ apiKey: process.env.BROWSERBASE_API_KEY });
  const session = await bb.sessions.create({
    projectId: process.env.BROWSERBASE_PROJECT_ID,
  });

  const browser = await chromium.connectOverCDP(session.connectUrl);
  const defaultContext = browser.contexts()[0];
  const page = defaultContext.pages()[0];

  // Configure download behavior
  const client = await defaultContext.newCDPSession(page);
  await client.send("Browser.setDownloadBehavior", {
    behavior: "allow",
    downloadPath: "downloads",
    eventsEnabled: true,
  });

  // Navigate to PDF and trigger download
  console.log("Attempting to download PDF...");
  const [download] = await Promise.all([
    page.waitForEvent("download"),
    page.goto("https://constitutioncenter.org/media/files/constitution.pdf").catch(() => {
      console.log("Navigation cancelled due to download (expected behavior)");
    })
  ]);

  let downloadError = await download.failure();
  if (downloadError !== null) {
    console.log("Error happened on download:", downloadError);
    throw new Error(downloadError);
  }

  console.log("PDF download completed successfully");

  console.log("Shutting down...");
  await page.close();
  await browser.close();
})().catch((error) => {
  console.error(error);
});

Python

Playwright

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright, Playwright
import os
from browserbase import Browserbase

def main(p: Playwright):
    print("Starting remote browser...")
    bb = Browserbase(api_key=os.environ["BROWSERBASE_API_KEY"])
    session = bb.sessions.create(project_id=os.environ["BROWSERBASE_PROJECT_ID"])

    browser = p.chromium.connect_over_cdp(session.connect_url)
    context = browser.contexts[0]
    page = context.pages[0]

    # Configure download behavior
    client = context.new_cdp_session(page)
    client.send("Browser.setDownloadBehavior", {
        "behavior": "allow",
        "downloadPath": "downloads",
        "eventsEnabled": True,
    })

    print("Attempting to download PDF...")

    # Set up download handling and navigate to PDF
    with page.expect_download() as download_info:
        try:
            page.goto("https://constitutioncenter.org/media/files/constitution.pdf")
        except Exception:
            print("Navigation cancelled due to download (expected behavior)")

    download = download_info.value

    # Check for download errors
    if download.failure():
        print(f"Error happened on download: {download.failure()}")
        raise Exception(download.failure())

    print("PDF download completed successfully")

    print("Shutting down...")
    page.close()
    browser.close()

with sync_playwright() as playwright:
    main(playwright)

After the PDF is downloaded, you can retrieve it from Browserbase’s cloud storage. See the Downloads documentation for information on how to access your downloaded files.

View or run the example template here

View PDFs

To view a PDF in the browser tab instead of automatically downloading it, you can set the enablePdfViewer property to true as follows:

Node.js

SDK

const bb = new Browserbase({ apiKey: process.env.BROWSERBASE_API_KEY });
const session = await bb.sessions.create({
  projectId: process.env.BROWSERBASE_PROJECT_ID,
  browserSettings: {
    enablePdfViewer: true,
  }
});

Python

SDK

bb = Browserbase(api_key=os.environ["BROWSERBASE_API_KEY"])
session = bb.sessions.create(
  project_id=os.environ["BROWSERBASE_PROJECT_ID"],
  browser_settings={
      "enablePdfViewer": True,
  },
)