Documentation

CookieMan documentation

Everything the extension does, in the order you are likely to need it. Version 1.1.0, Manifest V3, Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers.

Install

The illustrated walkthrough lives on the install page. The short version:

Download the zip (~26 KB).
Unpack it — right-click → Extract all. Keep the folder somewhere permanent.
Open chrome://extensions and turn on Developer mode.
Click Load unpacked and select the unpacked folder — the one containing manifest.json, not the zip.
Pin the icon to the toolbar and open any site.

In Microsoft Edge the steps are identical at edge://extensions. When the Chrome Web Store listing goes live, that becomes the one-click route.

Viewing cookies

Click the toolbar icon. The popup lists every cookie for the current tab's domain with its value, path, expiry and flags; the toolbar badge shows the count. The list is driven by the browser cookies API, so HttpOnly cookies appear even though page JavaScript cannot read them, and it refreshes as cookies are written, replaced or deleted.

Use the search box to filter by name, value or domain. Searching is local to the popup and does not change what is stored.

Editing and adding

Click a cookie to open the editor, or + Add to create one. Editable fields:

Name and Value
Domain — with or without a leading dot, plus a host-only toggle
Path
Expiration — a date and time, or switch to a session cookie
Secure, HttpOnly, SameSite (None / Lax / Strict)
Partitioned — the CHIPS partition key

Save applies the change through the browser. If the browser rejects the combination — for example SameSite=None without Secure — the popup surfaces the failure instead of pretending it worked. The attribute rules explain the common rejections; SameSite=None without Secure and __Host- rejected are the two that look like “the cookie vanished”.

Deleting

Delete a single cookie from its row or from inside the editor. Delete all clears the cookies currently listed for the domain, after a confirmation prompt — handy for starting a login flow from a clean state. Deletions are immediate and cannot be undone, so export first if the session matters.

Import

Open the destination site so the cookies are written where you expect.
Click Import and paste the data — any supported format.
Read the detected format and the preview of what will be written.
Click Apply.

Detection is automatic: JSON array or map, Netscape cookies.txt, a Cookie: header, Set-Cookie lines, or Base64-encoded JSON. Lines that cannot be parsed are reported as warnings rather than dropped in silence.

Export

Click Export.
Choose the scope — the current site, or all accessible cookies.
Choose the output format.
Copy to the clipboard or Download as a file.

Exported session cookies are credentials. Keep them off shared channels and delete the file when you are finished.

Supported formats

All six formats work for both import and export, in the extension and in the online converter. Field-level loss tables live in JSON Array vs cookies.txt and SameSite lost in cookies.txt.

Format	What it is	Typical consumer
JSON Array EditThisCookie / Cookie-Editor style	Full-fidelity array of cookie objects with every attribute. The safest choice for backups and transfers.	Cookie extensions, test fixtures
JSON Map name → value	Flat key/value object. Compact and easy to read, but attributes are not preserved.	Quick scripts, API clients
Netscape cookies.txt tab-separated	The classic seven-field text format understood by command line HTTP clients.	curl, wget, yt-dlp
Header String Cookie: request header	A single line ready to paste into a request header, REST client or fetch call.	Postman, DevTools, fetch()
Set-Cookie lines response headers	One Set-Cookie header per cookie, attributes included — how a server would issue them.	Server logs, HAR files
Base64 encoded JSON array	A JSON array wrapped in Base64 for pasting through fields that mangle punctuation.	CI secrets, chat transfer

Themes and language

The popup follows your system theme and can be pinned to light or dark from the header toggle. The interface ships in English and Russian; both the theme and language choices are remembered in extension storage. Nothing else is persisted — cookie values are never written to disk by the extension.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause and fix
Empty list on a browser page	Extensions cannot access `chrome://`, the Web Store or other restricted pages. Open a normal site.
“Error loading extension”	Select the unpacked folder containing `manifest.json`, not the zip file.
Extension disappears after restart	An unpacked extension must keep its folder. Do not delete or move it after loading.
Saved cookie does not appear	The browser rejected it — usually `Secure`, `SameSite=None`, a `__Host-`/`__Secure-` prefix rule, or a domain that does not match the origin.
Import found nothing	For `cookies.txt`, check that the separators are real tabs and the expiry is in seconds. Task-specific fixes: spaces instead of tabs, millisecond expiry, unknown format. Or normalise first in the converter.

Development install

To build from source instead of using the zip:

git clone https://github.com/cookieman-pro/cookieman
cd cookieman
npm install
npm run build:extension

Open chrome://extensions and enable Developer mode.
Choose Load unpacked and select extension/dist.
After changing source, run npm run build:extension again and press reload on the extension card.

The format parsers live in the shared @cookieman/core package, which is what both the extension and the website converter import — one implementation, two surfaces.