Developer quickstart

Generate a PDF with curl

Test authentication, template data, and binary PDF output directly from a terminal.

Prerequisites

  • A PDFDesignAPI account and API token.
  • A template UUID with a schema and at least one data binding.
  • Trusted server-side code where the token remains secret.

Generate and save the PDF

curl --fail-with-body -X POST \
  "https://pdfdesignapi.com/api/v1/generate/single/$TEMPLATE_UUID" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PDFDESIGNAPI_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d @payload.json \
  --output document.pdf

Production notes

  • Keep the token in an environment variable or secret store.
  • Use --fail-with-body so non-2xx responses fail the command while preserving useful error output.
  • The success response is binary PDF data, not JSON.
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