Jenkins Sidebar

Trigger and monitor Jenkins jobs without leaving your IDE. Browse your full folder hierarchy, star favorites, fill in build parameters, and watch builds run live — all from the activity bar.

Features

🗂 Full folder hierarchy

The job tree mirrors the Jenkins UI: folders, sub-folders, multibranch pipelines and their branch jobs, loaded in a single API request. Expansion state is remembered across sessions.

⭐ Favorites

Hover a job and click the star to pin it to the Favorites section at the top. Jobs you starred in the Jenkins UI itself (Favorite plugin, via Blue Ocean's API) show up there too — read-only, the extension never modifies them.

▶️ Trigger builds with parameters

Open a job to get a form for its parameters — text, boolean and choice parameters are supported, pre-filled with their defaults. CSRF crumbs are handled automatically.

📊 Build history & live progress

The last 10 builds with status, age and duration. Running builds show a live progress bar (based on Jenkins' estimated duration) and the view auto-refreshes every 10 seconds until the build finishes. After you trigger a job you stay on the page and watch it go from queued → running → done.

🎨 Native look & feel

The whole UI is built from your IDE theme variables — it follows your color theme, light, dark or high contrast.

Getting started

Install the extension and click the Jenkins icon in the activity bar (or press Cmd+Alt+J / Ctrl+Alt+J).
Enter your server URL, username and an API token (create one in Jenkins: your avatar → Security → API Token → Add new token).
Hit Connect — your jobs appear.

Credentials are stored in your IDE's encrypted secret storage (Keychain on macOS, Credential Manager on Windows, libsecret on Linux). The API token never leaves the extension host — the sidebar webview itself never sees it.

Commands & shortcuts

Command	Default keybinding
Focus Jenkins Sidebar	`Cmd+Alt+J` (mac) / `Ctrl+Alt+J`
Refresh Jenkins Jobs	— (also available as the ↻ button in the sidebar)

Settings

Setting	Default	Description
`jenkinsSidebar.allowInsecureTls`	`false`	Allow connections to servers with untrusted TLS certificates (expired, self-signed, unknown CA). Only enable for servers you trust — it disables certificate verification.

Troubleshooting

Every failed request shows a toast with a Show Details button — full diagnostics (URL, HTTP status, response body, TLS error codes) land in the Jenkins Sidebar output channel (View → Output).
Certificate errors (expired/self-signed certs on internal servers) can be bypassed with the allowInsecureTls setting — the error toast links straight to it.
Jenkins-side favorites require the Blue Ocean plugin on the server, since the Favorite plugin doesn't expose its data through the classic remote API. The output channel logs which source was used.

Good to know

The extension is read-only towards Jenkins with one exception: triggering builds (POST .../build(WithParameters)). It never deletes, disables or modifies jobs.
Job requests are sent to the server URL you logged in with, even when Jenkins' own configured root URL points elsewhere (http vs https, internal hostnames, reverse-proxy prefixes).
Folders deeper than 10 levels are shown but their contents aren't loaded.

Development

npm install
npm run watch     # rebuild on change

Press F5 in your IDE to launch an Extension Development Host. Cmd+R in that window reloads after webview changes; restart the debug session after package.json changes.

npm run package   # production build (dist/)

License

MIT

Bipin Krishna