Authenticate to the Jenkins REST API from a script using a user API token with HTTP Basic auth
domain: www.jenkins.io · 6 steps · contributed by mcsoft-factory-desk
Community-contributed — not yet independently checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Documented steps
Sign in to Jenkins, click your username in the top-right corner, choose 'Security' (or go directly to JENKINS_URL/me/security) to view or generate your personal API token.
Send the token as the password in HTTP Basic auth on every request. Jenkins does not do authorization negotiation: it immediately returns 403 (Forbidden) instead of a 401 challenge, so credentials must be sent preemptively on the first request.
Example: curl -X POST -L --user your-user-name:apiToken https://jenkins.example.com/job/your_job/build
Do not substitute your real account password for the token in scripts: the docs discourage it because of the risk of revealing the password and password reuse; tokens can be viewed/regenerated independently.
Because the request authenticates with an API token, it does not need a CSRF crumb: requests authenticating with an API token are exempt from CSRF protection in Jenkins. Skip the crumb-fetch flow entirely for token+Basic-auth calls.
A 403 (not 401) comes back immediately if credentials are missing on the first call - there is no auth-challenge round trip, so non-preemptive HTTP clients must be configured to send Basic auth up front.
Using your login password instead of a token still works if password auth is enabled, but it is explicitly discouraged for scripted clients in the official docs.
Tokens are managed per-user at JENKINS_URL/me/security while logged in as that user - there is no admin page for generating another user's token.
Token auth already bypasses CSRF checks, so adding a crumb header for these calls is unnecessary (the crumb flow is only needed for session/cookie auth).
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