How to Decrypt and Remove Password Protection from a PDF using Node.js

Applications that handle and process a large volume of PDF documents can certainly benefit from a wide range of quality-of-life improvements.

Using the below code, we can freely add an API to our application that allows us to enter creator-supplied passwords and automatically remove encryption measures in a single in-memory request.

We can easily implement this API in two quick steps.

Let’s first install the SDK by running the below command:

npm install cloudmersive-convert-api-client --save

Or we can alternatively include this snippet in our package.json:

  "dependencies": {
    "cloudmersive-convert-api-client": "^2.6.3"
  }

Finally, let’s copy the ready-to-run Node.js code examples below into our file and supply a free-tier API key to authorize our requests:

var CloudmersiveConvertApiClient = require('cloudmersive-convert-api-client');
var defaultClient = CloudmersiveConvertApiClient.ApiClient.instance;

// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
var Apikey = defaultClient.authentications['Apikey'];
Apikey.apiKey = 'YOUR API KEY';



var apiInstance = new CloudmersiveConvertApiClient.EditPdfApi();

var password = "password_example"; // String | Valid password for the PDF file

var inputFile = Buffer.from(fs.readFileSync("C:\\temp\\inputfile").buffer); // File | Input file to perform the operation on.


var callback = function(error, data, response) {
  if (error) {
    console.error(error);
  } else {
    console.log('API called successfully. Returned data: ' + data);
  }
};
apiInstance.editPdfDecrypt(password, inputFile, callback);

Yep, that’s all there is to it — no more code required. Simple and easy!