General

Authentication

Rate Limits

Errors

Endpoints

Generate PDF

Get Document

Get File

Overview

The PDFGate API provides simple HTTP endpoints to generate high quality PDF files based on an HTML document or a URL resource. In this page you will find everything you need in order to use the API.

Authentication

To use the API, you need to always authenticate the HTTP requests you initiate. PDFGate is using API keys for the authentication.

Firstly, you need to login to your account and create an API key. Make sure it is active and then you can use it in your source code.

In your HTTP requests you need to provide the Authorization header with the value Bearer YOUR_API_KEY.

There are two types of API keys. Production and Sandbox keys and they have the following format.

Production: live_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sandbox: test_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Rate limits

The PDFGate API is using different rate limits for each account type in Production environment for different endpoints. For Sandbox environment the rate limits are the same for all account types.

Endpoint	Production	Sandbox
POST /generate/pdf	Per account type: Personal: 3 Starter: 5 Basic: 15 Professional: 20 Professional Plus: 30	Per account type: Personal: Not Available Starter: Not Available Basic: 2 Professional: 2 Professional Plus: 2
GET /document	40 concurrent requests	10 concurrent requests
GET /file	40 concurrent requests	10 concurrent requests

Errors

Code	Error
400	Bad request
401	Unauthorized
404	Not found
422	Unprocessable entity
429	Too many requests
500	Internal server error

Generate PDF

To create a PDF document you need to send a URL or HTML in the request body and in the headers you should include your API key and the content type.

With this endpoint you can have two response types. By default you will get a raw PDF file and by specifying the field jsonResponse you can get a JSON response with the details of your generated document.

Endpoint

POSThttps://api.pdfgate.com/v1/generate/pdf

Examples

NODE.JS

PYTHON

GOLANG

CURL

const fetch = require("node-fetch");

const fs = require("fs");

const options = {

method: "POST",

headers: {

"Content-Type": "application/json",

"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY",

},

body: JSON.stringify({

url: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupcake",

pageSizeType: "a4",

}),

};

fetch("https://api.pdfgate.com/v1/generate/pdf", options).then( async (result) => {

if (result.status === 201) {

result.body.pipe(fs.createWriteStream("file_name.pdf"));

} else {

const error = await result.json();

console.log(error);

}

});

Request body fields

html string required if url field is not provided

url string required if html field is not provided

jsonResponse boolean

Default: false

Returns JSON response instead of file stream.

pageSizeType enum

Default: ledger

Acceptable values

a0a1a2a3a4a5a6ledgertabloidlegalletter

width number

Custom PDF file width in pixels (px). It needs to be defined with the height field.

height number

Custom PDF file height in pixels (px). It needs to be defined with the width field.

orientation enum

Default: portrait

Acceptable values

portraitlandscape

header string

footer string

margin object

timeout number

Default: 30000

Maximum wait time to render the HTML content in milliseconds.

security object

javascript string

css string

emulateMediaType enum

Sets the CSS media type of the document.

Acceptable values

screenprint

waitForSelector string

Waits for specific CSS selector to be loaded. It will timeout in 30 seconds.

clickSelector string

Waits and then clicks a specific CSS selector.

waitForNetworkIdle boolean

Waits until there are no more network connections in the document.

httpHeaders object

Sets custom HTTP headers.

metadata object

Sets custom data to your document record.

Available responses

File stream

{"id" : "6642381c5c61""status" : "completed""fileUrl" : "https://api.pdfgate.com/file/6642381c5c61""documentUrl" : "https://api.pdfgate.com/document/6642381c5c61""size" : 1620006"createdAt" : "2024-02-13T15:56:12.607Z"}

Get document

Gets a generated document object.

Endpoint

GEThttps://api.pdfgate.com/document/{documentId}

Examples

NODE.JS

PYTHON

GOLANG

CURL

const fetch = require("node-fetch");

const options = {

method: "GET",

headers: {

"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY",

},

};

fetch("https://api.pdfgate.com/document/{documentId}", options).then( async (result) => {

const data = await result.json();

});

Response

Get file

Gets a raw PDF file.

Endpoint

GEThttps://api.pdfgate.com/file/{documentId}

Examples

NODE.JS

PYTHON

GOLANG

CURL

const fetch = require("node-fetch");

const fs = require("fs");

const options = {

method: "GET",

headers: {

"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY",

},

};

fetch("https://api.pdfgate.com/file/{documentId}", options).then( async (result) => {

result.body.pipe(fs.createWriteStream("file_name.pdf"));

});

Response

File stream