Unlock PDF#

What It Does#

Removes password protection from an encrypted PDF via the PDFAPIHub hosted API. Your PDF file and the decryption password are uploaded to PDFAPIHub servers, where the service decrypts the document and returns the unlocked PDF.

When to Use#

• Decrypt a password-protected PDF for further processing
• Remove read restrictions from a PDF you own

Required Inputs#

• password — the password to unlock the PDF
• Plus one of: url, base64_pdf, or multipart file upload

Authentication#

This skill calls the PDFAPIHub hosted API at https://pdfapihub.com/api. Your PDF and password are sent to PDFAPIHub servers for decryption.

Send your API key in the CLIENT-API-KEY header.

Get your free API key at https://pdfapihub.com. Full API documentation is available at https://pdfapihub.com/docs.

Security & Privacy:

• Your PDF file and decryption password are transmitted to PDFAPIHub's cloud service over HTTPS
• Do not send highly sensitive documents or passwords you use elsewhere without understanding this risk
• Files are auto-deleted from PDFAPIHub servers after 30 days
• PDFAPIHub does not store or log passwords after processing

Use Cases#

• Legacy Document Access — Unlock old password-protected PDFs when you have the password
• Workflow Automation — Decrypt PDFs in an automated pipeline before merging, splitting, or parsing
• Print Enablement — Remove print restrictions from PDFs you own for printing
• Content Extraction — Unlock PDFs before running OCR or text extraction
• Pre-Processing — Decrypt encrypted PDFs before further PDF operations (merge, compress, watermark)

Example Usage#

bash

curl -X POST https://pdfapihub.com/api/v1/unlockPdf \
  -H "CLIENT-API-KEY: your_api_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://pdfapihub.com/sampleprotected.pdf",
    "password": "secret123",
    "output": "url"
  }'