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

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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)

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

| Format | Language IDs | Notes | |