Authentication and sessions

Use your own Pinterest cookies with Pinto, and save, restore, and isolate sessions.

Anonymous reads work immediately. A logged-in session gets its own per-account quota and looks like an ordinary browser.

Use your cookies

1. Log in

   Log into pinterest.com in your own browser.

2. Copy the Cookie header

   In DevTools, open Network and copy any request’s Cookie header value.

3. Pass it to Pinto

   const pinto = createPinto();
   await pinto.setCookies("_pinterest_sess=...; csrftoken=...; ...");
   
   console.log(pinto.isAuthenticated()); // true
   

Treat cookies like passwords. Never commit them, never expose them to end users, and store them encrypted server-side.

Save and restore sessions

Persist the session so credentials survive restarts with useFileSession. It’s also a good guide for writing a Redis or Postgres store.

import { createPinto, useFileSession } from "@traceryn/pinto";

const { state, saveSession } = await useFileSession("./.pinto-session");

const pinto = createPinto({
  session: state,
  saveSession: (s) => saveSession(s), // called after cookies change
});

For tests and short-lived jobs, use an in-memory session:

import { createPinto, useMemorySession } from "@traceryn/pinto";

const { state, saveSession } = useMemorySession();
const pinto = createPinto({ session: state, saveSession });

Multi-tenant clients

Every client is fully isolated. Device fingerprint, rate budget, cache namespace, cookies, and fetch all hang off the session object.

function clientForUser(user) {
  return createPinto({
    session: user.pintoSession,
    saveSession: (s) => db.save(user.id, s),
  });
}

Cookie import formats

importCookies auto-detects the format you paste.

import { createEmptySession, importCookies } from "@traceryn/pinto";
import { readFile } from "node:fs/promises";

const session = createEmptySession();

// 1. Raw Cookie header (DevTools -> Network -> copy "Cookie" value).
//    Handles quotes, %-encoding, and ";" inside JSON values (g_state).
importCookies(session, "csrftoken=...; _pinterest_sess=...; g_state={...}");

// 2. Browser-extension JSON array: [{ name, value, domain, ... }, ...]
importCookies(session, extensionExportJson);

// 3. cookies.txt (Netscape / curl format, tab-separated).
importCookies(session, await readFile("./cookies.txt", "utf8"));