---
title: "Using cookies to convert HTML documents to PDF"
description: "Learn how to add custom Cookies when requesting an URL to be converted in PDF with PDFShift's API. It allows you to pursue an active session for instance, that will authenticate the request as a specific user before converting the page to PDF. This guide explains you how using Python and the aiohttp library."
language: 'Python'
library: 'aiohttp'
property: 'cookies'
output: 'pdf'
related: ['send-custom-http-headers', 'accessing-secured-pages']
default: false
---

In this comprehensive guide, we will demonstrate the step-by-step process of incorporating custom Cookies into your URL request for PDF conversion using PDFShift's API. By leveraging this functionality, you can maintain an active session, enabling authentication as a specific user before generating the PDF document.

To do so, we'll use the `cookies` parameter when sending a request to PDFShift. It expects a list of dictionnary that contains the name and the value of the cookies (more details after):

```python
import aiohttp, asyncio, json

# You can get an API key at https://pdfshift.io
api_key = 'sk_xxxxxxxxxxxx'

params = {
    'source': 'https://www.example.com',
    # The "cookies" parameter expects a list of dictionnary that contains the name and the value of the cookies
    'cookies': [
        { 'name': 'PHPSESSID', 'value': 'el4ukv0kqbvoirg7nkp4dncpk3' }
    ]
}

response = None
try:
    async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
        async with session.post(
            'https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf',
            headers={'X-API-Key': api_key},
            json=params
        ) as response:
            if response.status >= 400:
                raise Exception('Invalid request: {}'.format(await response.text()))

            with open('result.pdf', 'wb') as f:
                f.write(await response.read())

            print('The PDF document was generated and saved to result.pdf')
except asyncio.TimeoutError:
    raise Exception('The request took too long to process')
except aiohttp.ClientError as e:
    raise Exception(f'An error occurred: {e}')
except Exception as e:
    # We highly recommend you to handle exceptions. Often, PDFShift will provide you with a clear explanation about what happened.
    # Moreover, in case of error, no PDF are returned !
    raise Exception(f'An error occurred: {e}')
```

The `cookies` parameter accept the following parameters:

 * `name` : The name of the cookie.
 * `value`: The value of the cookie.
 * `secure`: A boolean (defaults to false) that will tell the browser to only send the cookie if the request is being sent over HTTPS.
 * `http_only`: A boolean (defaults to false) that will tell the browser to not expose it to client-side scripts.

Like in our guide to send custom HTTP headers or to access secured pages, this allows you to protect your documents from any visitors while allowing PDFShift to access the page and convert it to PDF.