URLs-LE

URLs-LE: Zero Hassle URL Extraction

Pull every URL out of the current file in one keystroke

Any text file — Markdown, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, YAML, Properties, TOML, INI and XML know what to exclude

Useful? A star or rating is how other developers find it — ★ GitHub · ★ Open VSX · ★ Marketplace

What it does

Open a file, run URLs-LE: Extract URLs, and every URL in the document lands in a new editor — deduplicate and sort it from there. Works in VS Code and in VS Code–based editors like Cursor and VSCodium (installable from Open VSX).

• Link auditing — every link, autolink, and plain URL in Markdown and HTML (code blocks excluded in Markdown, comments excluded in HTML)
• Source review — URLs in string literals, template literals, and comments across JS/TS
• Config sweep — URLs in JSON strings, YAML values, Java properties, TOML/INI values, and XML (Maven POMs, feeds)

Install

Use it from an AI agent

The same extraction engine runs as an MCP server, so an agent can call it directly instead of you running a command.

extract_urls(content, format?, filename?, dedupe?, maxResults?)

Returns every URL with its protocol and 1-based line and column, capped at 500 by default with meta.truncated so a large file cannot flood the agent's context window.

The server takes content and returns data — it reads no files and makes no network requests of its own. Published as urls-le-mcp on npm and as io.github.nolindnaidoo/urls-le in the MCP registry.

Configuring it by hand — any host with an MCP config file

Most hosts read a JSON config. Add one entry:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "urls-le": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "urls-le-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

-y skips the install prompt on first run. Pin a version if you would rather not track releases — urls-le-mcp@2.4.0.

Prefer not to go through npx on every launch? Install it once and point at the binary instead:

npm install -g urls-le-mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "urls-le": { "command": "urls-le-mcp" }
  }
}

It speaks MCP over stdio and needs no environment variables, no API key and no configuration of its own. To check it before wiring it into anything:

echo '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}' | npx -y urls-le-mcp

That prints the tool list and exits — if you see extract_urls, the server works.

Across a folder or a workspace

Extract reads the document you have open. A scan reads many files from disk and gives one report.

• The whole workspace: run URLs-LE: Extract URLs from Workspace from the command palette.
• One folder: right-click it in the Explorer and choose Extract URLs from Folder, or run URLs-LE: Extract URLs from Folder and pick one.

A project writes the same URL in many places, so the report is the distinct URLs, the most widely used first, with how often each is written and where:

# URLs-LE workspace report

`my-project` · 3 file(s) read · 2 distinct URL(s), 5 occurrence(s) in 3 file(s)

| URL | Occurrences | Files |
|---|---|---|
| `https://example.com/docs` | 3 | 2 |
| `https://api.example.com/v1` | 2 | 2 |

## `https://example.com/docs` (3)

- `config.json` · **2:12**
- `docs/a.md` · **1:5**, **1:34**

## `https://api.example.com/v1` (2)

- `docs/a.md` · **2:6**
- `src/b.ts` · **1:14**

That is with urls-le.showPositions on. It is off by default, and then each line is the file and how many times the URL is in it: docs/a.md (2). The copy on the clipboard follows urls-le.clipboardIncludesPositions, as it does for Extract.

What a scan reads. Files come from disk, so an unsaved edit is not seen. A file over the safety size, or one that is not UTF-8 text, is left unread. It stops at 5,000 files or 10,000 listed occurrences. The report ends with a line for each thing it left out, so a short report is never mistaken for a clean project.

What it skips, and how to change that. Three switches are on by default, and each can be turned off on its own in Settings:

Two lists adjust the result without turning a switch off. To skip more, add a pattern to scanExcludes. To read something a switch would skip, add it to scanAlwaysInclude:

{
    // Also skip the test fixtures.
    "urls-le.workspace.scanExcludes": ["**/fixtures/**"],
    // Read the vendored code, though the built-in list skips it.
    "urls-le.workspace.scanAlwaysInclude": ["**/vendor/**"]
}

URLs-LE: Open Settings opens all of these in the Settings editor.

The built-in list

Folders, wherever they appear:

.git, .hg, .svn, node_modules, bower_components, jspm_packages, .pnpm-store, .yarn, vendor, site-packages, Pods, Carthage, dist, build, out, target, _build, _site, dist-newstyle, zig-out, storybook-static, cdk.out, DerivedData, CMakeFiles, .next, .nuxt, .output, .svelte-kit, .angular, .astro, .docusaurus, .vuepress, .expo, .turbo, .parcel-cache, .cache, .sass-cache, .jekyll-cache, .dart_tool, .pub-cache, .gradle, .kotlin, .cxx, .externalNativeBuild, captures, ephemeral, .symlinks, .swiftpm, .build, .bundle, .stack-work, .zig-cache, .godot, elm-stuff, .vercel, .netlify, .serverless, .aws-sam, .terraform, .venv, venv, __pycache__, .tox, .nox, .mypy_cache, .pytest_cache, .ruff_cache, .ipynb_checkpoints, .eggs, coverage, htmlcov, .nyc_output, .vscode-test, .idea, .vs, xcuserdata, *.egg-info

Files, wherever they appear:

*.min.js, *.min.css, *.map, *.snap, *.lock, package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, npm-shrinkwrap.json, go.sum, *.pbxproj, *.iml, local.properties, output-metadata.json, .flutter-plugins, .flutter-plugins-dependencies, .packages, Generated.xcconfig, flutter_export_environment.sh, GeneratedPluginRegistrant.*, fastlane/report.xml, fastlane/test_output/**, doc/api/**

Not on the list, because they are ordinary folders in many projects: bin, obj, tmp, logs, public, generated. A project that generates those ignores them in git, and the scan reads .gitignore.

The settings that shape a scan are under Settings.

The CLI

The same extraction runs from a terminal or a shell pipeline: a Rust CLI in crate/, sharing one corpus with the extension — crate/fixtures/ — so the two can never read a document differently. Install it from npm with npm install -g url-le (or run it with npx url-le) or from crates.io with cargo install urls-le. Both install the same urls-le command and are held to the same output byte for byte. The npm package is named url-le because urls-le was taken there.

urls-le .                     # every URL in the tree; JSON on stdout when piped
urls-le --dedupe docs/        # one line per distinct URL
urls-le mcp                   # the same extraction over MCP on stdio

# the point of the whole thing:
urls-le . | jq -r '.urls[].value' | sort -u | lychee -

Install it from npm (url-le) or from crates.io (urls-le). Both install the same urls-le command.

npm install -g url-le   # or run it once: npx url-le
cargo install urls-le

Exit codes follow grep — 0 URLs found, 1 none found, 2 the question was malformed — so if urls-le src/; then … works and finding nothing is an answer rather than an error.

It has no opinions, deliberately. No link checking, no insecure-scheme flag, no filtering. An http:// URL is wrong in a production config and right in a test fixture; a tool that decides for you is one you configure, then argue with, then mute — and the muting takes the extraction with it. Pipe it to lychee and let that have the opinions.

Supported formats

No document is refused. The eleven above know what to exclude; every other language id — python, go, shellscript, csv, plaintext, log, whatever your editor calls it — is scanned whole, because a URL is unambiguous in any text and there is nothing in those worth excluding.

Extracted protocols: http, https, ftp, file, mailto (requires an @), tel. Every occurrence is reported with its real line and column — TOML positions are forward-located in the source and can be approximate for repeated identical values. A URL ends at whitespace or a quote/bracket delimiter, so relative links (/docs) and bare domains (example.com) are never extracted, and URLs containing raw spaces extract as space-terminated partials. Trailing ./, are kept — they are legal URL characters.

Commands

No command is bound to a key by default. Give any of them one under Keyboard Shortcuts in the editor.

Settings

Languages

Twelve languages besides English:

German · Spanish · French · Indonesian · Italian · Japanese · Korean · Portuguese (Brazil) · Russian · Ukrainian · Vietnamese · Chinese (Simplified)

Both halves are covered — the manifest (command titles, setting names and descriptions) and everything shown while the extension runs (notifications, the status bar, the sort quick-pick). The extension follows VS Code's display language, so it matches whatever the editor is already set to; no setting of its own.

Privacy & security

• No network access. The extension never fetches, validates, or pings the URLs it extracts — it only reads the text of the active document. The telemetryEnabled setting writes events to a local Output Channel you can inspect (URLs-LE Telemetry); nothing leaves your machine.
• The MCP server holds the same line. It takes content as an argument and returns data: no filesystem access, no network calls, no telemetry. Your agent already has file-read tools, so duplicating them inside the server would add a path-traversal surface for no capability. check:mcp-bundle fails the build if the server ever imports something that could reach either.
• Error notifications redact home directories and credential-shaped fragments.
• One rating prompt, at most twice. On the 3rd successful use the extension asks once whether you would rate it, and once more on the 20th if you chose Later or dismissed it. Don't Ask Again ends it. Setting notificationsLevel to important or silent yourself turns it off. The counts are kept in VS Code's extension storage and nothing is sent anywhere; Rate opens the listing you installed from — the VS Code Marketplace or Open VSX — in your browser.

Documentation

Performance

Median of 7 runs after warmup, on Apple M5 Pro, 24 GB RAM, Node 24.3.0. Inputs are generated by scripts/benchmark.ts rather than checked in, so the sizes above are exactly what was measured. Reproduce with bun run benchmark.

These are machine-specific and are not asserted in CI — a benchmark that gates a build only tells you how busy the runner was.

Testing

475 test cases across 35 files, plus an integration suite that runs in a real VS Code extension host and an end-to-end test that installs the built .vsix into a clean profile.

Generated from a real run — coverage/coverage-summary.json and coverage/test-results.json — by scripts/coverage-readme.js; CI fails if this section drifts. Reproduce with bun run test:coverage, and the case count is the one vitest prints.

More from the LE family

Sixteen single-purpose tools for the work in front of every model. Each ships a Rust CLI and an MCP server. One page: letools.dev

Get it out

• String-LE — Extract every string in a codebase, so a person can read them
• Numbers-LE — Extract every hardcoded number in a codebase, so a person can check them
• Units-LE — Extract every quantity with its unit, normalized, and refuse the ambiguous ones by name
• Dates-LE — Extract every date and timestamp, and the exact instant each one resolves to
• IDs-LE — Extract every UUID, ULID, NanoID, ObjectId and Snowflake, and decode the time inside
• IPs-LE — Extract every IP address, CIDR block and MAC, normalized and classified by scope
• URLs-LE — Extract every URL in a codebase, with its protocol and exact position
• Paths-LE — Extract every file path in a codebase, and say whether it still points at anything
• Colors-LE — Extract every color in a codebase, and say which ones are not in your palette

Check it

• Regex-LE — Find every regex in a codebase, and report which can be driven into catastrophic backtracking
• Versions-LE — Find where one dependency is constrained differently across a repository's manifests
• i18n-LE — Identify the i18n library a project uses, then audit its catalogs by that library's rules
• Scrape-LE — Check whether a page is scrapeable before the scraper is written, and say when it cannot tell

Guard it

• Secrets-LE — Find hardcoded credentials in a codebase, and never print one into the report
• EnvSync-LE — Compare the dotenv files in a tree, and say which keys are missing from which
• Unicode-LE — Find the Unicode that hides meaning — bidi controls, invisibles, homoglyphs, mixed scripts

Each stands on its own: no shared crate, no published core. Where two of them agree, it is because the same answer was right twice.

Contact — nolindnaidoo.com · GitHub · LinkedIn

Also by nolindnaidoo

Rust — pixelcoords and pixelactions are one loop: pixelcoords answers where, pixelactions acts there. Their own tools, their own voice — not part of the LE family.

• pixelcoords — Freeze your screen, mark regions, get pixel-exact coordinates and crops pixelcoords.dev · crates.io · docs.rs
• pixelactions — Consume human-verified coordinates, perform the interaction, confirm it landed pixelactions.dev · crates.io · docs.rs

License

MIT © nolindnaidoo