A Cookie Exporter That Keeps Your Data Where It Belongs: On Your Machine

If you've ever tried to script a download with wget or curl against a site that requires authentication, you know the drill. You need a cookies.txt file. And the moment you go looking for a browser extension to grab one, you're faced with a quiet question: where exactly is that extension sending your session cookies? Get cookies.txt LOCALLY is a browser extension built around a single, blunt promise—it exports your cookies and never sends them anywhere else.

What It Does

Get cookies.txt LOCALLY exports your browser cookies in either Netscape or JSON format. If you've used command-line tools like wget or curl, or Python's MozillaCookieJar, you'll recognize the Netscape format immediately—it's the one those tools expect. The JSON option is there if you'd rather work with structured data in your own scripts.

The extension is built for both Chrome and Firefox, and it lives in the browser as a standard Manifest V3 extension. Its source code is open and unobfuscated, so you can read it on GitHub or dig into the extension's own installation directory on your machine. That's the whole point: the thing that touches your cookies is something you can actually inspect.

The permissions it requests are listed plainly in the README, which is refreshingly rare. It asks for activeTab (to get the current tab's URL), cookies (to read and export them—explicitly not to write or send), downloads (only for saving the local file), notifications (for update alerts), and host permissions (again, for reading and exporting, not writing or sending). Notably, the downloads permission is a newer addition—versions before v0.3.x triggered file exports through link generation and simulated clicks, and the switch to the downloads API makes the export method cleaner.

Why It's Cool

• The threat model is the feature. Cookie export extensions have historically been a sketchy corner of the browser store, because a session cookie is basically a password. This project's entire pitch is that the data never leaves your machine. The README says it never transmits your information externally, and because the code is readable, you don't have to take that on faith.

• Your permissions get explained, not buried. Most extensions list permissions and hope you don't read them. Here, each permission comes with a plain-language reason, including the distinction between reading cookies and writing or sending them. That level of transparency is the kind of thing you wish every extension did.

• It speaks the format your tools already want. Netscape cookies.txt support means it drops straight into existing workflows—wget, curl, Python's MozillaCookieJar, and anything else that reads that format. No conversion step, no custom parser.

• You can verify it yourself. Since the extension directory paths for Windows, Mac, and Linux are documented in the README, you can go find the installed files and read them directly. For anyone who's ever wondered what's actually inside an extension they installed, this makes that investigation trivial.

• It's honest about its own history. The README notes the shift from link generation to the downloads API, and it flags that store versions may lag behind the repo depending on review status, and that Firefox may have some limited features. That kind of disclosure builds more trust than a polished feature list.

How to Try It

The easiest route is the official store listings:

1. Install from the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-ons.
2. Note that store versions may not be the latest, and some features may be limited in Firefox. You may need to allow access to site resources from the extension manager.

If you'd rather run it from source (Chrome):

1. Download and unzip the repository.
2. Open chrome://extensions/.
3. Enable "Developer mode."
4. Click "Load Unpacked" and select the Get-cookies.txt-LOCALLY/src directory.

For Firefox from source, you'll need to patch the manifest by merging src/manifest.json and src/manifest-firefox.json. You can use the firefox branch (which has the merged manifest), or run npm run build:firefox, use jq, or merge it manually.

The repo is at github.com/kairi003/get-cookies.txt-locally.

Final Thoughts

This isn't a flashy tool, and it doesn't try to be. It does one narrow job—exporting cookies in a format your scripts can use—and it does it without asking you to trust a black box. If you regularly pull authenticated content with command-line tools, or if you just don't like the idea of your session cookies passing through someone else's server, this is worth having installed. The best takeaway is the design philosophy: a small utility that treats "where does my data go" as the first question, not an afterthought.

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