guides

Import and export cookies

Move cookies between browsers and tools — JSON round-trips, Netscape cookies.txt for curl, wget and yt-dlp, and a ready-to-run curl command.

JSON

The JSON export is the full-fidelity, browser-to-browser format: every cookie attribute is preserved in Chrome’s native cookie shape, so nothing is lost on the round trip. Export the cookies on machine A, import the file on machine B, and you have the same session there.

Use JSON when the other end is a browser (yours or a teammate’s). If the other end is a Playwright or Puppeteer test, use the storageState export instead — its cookie shape is what those tools expect, and the plain JSON export is not. The precise field layout of each format is documented in the export formats reference.

Netscape cookies.txt

cookies.txt is the classic tab-separated format that command-line tools have read for decades. Export it from SessionCourier and hand it straight to curl, wget, or yt-dlp:

curl -b cookies.txt https://staging.example.com/api/me
wget --load-cookies cookies.txt https://staging.example.com/report.pdf
yt-dlp --cookies cookies.txt "https://example.com/members-only-video"

The file itself is one cookie per line, seven tab-separated fields. A leading #HttpOnly_ on the domain marks an HttpOnly cookie:

# Netscape HTTP Cookie File
.staging.example.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	1789430400	session	abc123
#HttpOnly_.staging.example.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	1789430400	refresh_token	xyz789

curl command

For a one-off API call, export a runnable curl command — the current cookies replayed against the site as one literal Cookie header, ready to paste into a shell:

curl 'https://staging.example.com/' -H 'Cookie: session=abc123; refresh_token=xyz789'

The command targets https:// when any cookie is Secure, otherwise http://; exporting the all-sites view emits one command per host. It carries cookie values only — no domain, path, expiry, or flags — so it’s best for quick, short-lived requests rather than persisting a session.

Importing

Import reads a JSON export — the full-fidelity format above. Open the import menu and either paste the JSON or pick a .json file; SessionCourier writes each cookie into the active tab’s cookie store. The other formats (Netscape, curl) are one-way — they hand cookies to external tools and aren’t re-imported.

Import merges into the current store: it overwrites any existing cookie with the same name, domain, and path (last write wins) and leaves the rest untouched. Import into the browser profile you intend to change — a snapshot from one account overwrites the matching cookies of whatever account is currently logged in.