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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.browserbase.com/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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 the Downloads documentation.
  3. View: Display PDFs in the browser, instead of downloading them, by setting the enablePdfViewer property in your browser settings.

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Generate PDFs

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

  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 and cancels the navigation. Browserbase stores the file in cloud storage for later retrieval. 
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();

  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);
});
Retrieve the downloaded PDF from Browserbase’s cloud storage. See Downloads for details on accessing your files.
View or run the example template here

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View PDFs

To view a PDF in the browser tab instead of downloading it, set enablePdfViewer to true: 
const bb = new Browserbase({ apiKey: process.env.BROWSERBASE_API_KEY });
const session = await bb.sessions.create({
  browserSettings: {
    enablePdfViewer: true,
  },
});