name: overleaf-cookie
description: "Use when extracting Overleaf login cookies from Chrome on macOS for the VSCode Overleaf Workshop extension. Decrypts Chrome's cookie store and outputs the session cookie in the exact format the extension expects. Triggers: "overleaf cookie", "overleaf login", "overleaf workshop cookie", "get overleaf cookie", "vscode overleaf login"
Overleaf Cookie Extractor
When to Use
- You need to log into the Overleaf Workshop VSCode extension via cookie login
- You're on macOS and use Chrome as your browser
- Overleaf's SSO/captcha blocks normal password login in the extension
- You want the exact
overleaf_session2 cookie string without manually opening DevTools
Requirements
- macOS (Chrome cookie decryption uses macOS Keychain)
- Chrome browser with an active Overleaf login session
- Python 3 with
browser_cookie3 installed (pip install browser_cookie3)
Quick Use
python skills/apps/overleaf-cookie/scripts/get_overleaf_cookie.py
Output:
overleaf_session2=s:XXXXXXXXXXXX.XXXXXXXXXXXX
Copy the entire line and paste it into VSCode → Overleaf Workshop: Login with Cookies → Server: https://www.overleaf.com.
How It Works
Chrome encrypts cookies using AES-128-CBC (v10) or AES-256-GCM (v11) on macOS. The encryption key lives in the macOS Keychain under "Chrome Safe Storage". The browser_cookie3 library handles the keychain access and decryption automatically.
The script:
- Opens Chrome's SQLite cookie DB at
~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Cookies
- Decrypts all cookies via the Keychain-derived key
- Filters for
overleaf_session2 on .overleaf.com
- URL-decodes the value (Chrome sometimes stores percent-encoded characters)
- Prints the clean
name=value string
Known Extension Bug (As of 2025-06)
The Overleaf Workshop extension's cookiesLogin() method parses the /project page HTML to extract user-id, user-email, and csrf-token from <meta> tags. Overleaf renamed these tags:
| Old (extension expects) | New (Overleaf serves) |
|---|
name="user-id" | name="ol-user_id" |
name="user-email" | name="ol-usersEmail" |
name="csrf-token" | name="ol-csrfToken" |
This causes "Failed to get User ID" even with a perfectly valid cookie. The cookie itself is correct — the extension's regex is outdated.
Workarounds:
- Patch locally — edit the installed extension's
out/api/base.js (or src/api/base.ts) to match the new ol-* meta tag names
- Use DevTools login — follow the official manual method and copy the raw Cookie header directly; in some cases the extension bypasses the broken parser path
- Wait for upstream fix — file an issue at
iamhyc/Overleaf-Workshop
Anti-Patterns
- Do not manually copy the cookie from Chrome DevTools → Application → Cookies — the value shown there may be URL-encoded and will fail if pasted directly
- Do not use
curl or wget to test the cookie — Overleaf's /project endpoint returns different HTML to non-browser user-agents, making verification unreliable
- Do not commit cookies or session tokens to git — they are ephemeral credentials
See Also
