Authenticate once
Is there a way to authenticate once and use a session-token instead of sending creds in plain text for every request?
I would expect it to implement an .authenticate(user,pwd, callback(err, token)) method, and work with a session-token instead of sending creds in plain text...
Maybe there is?
I did see I can inject whatever headers to each request. Is that what you mean users to hook on? In that case - is there a method that just authenticates and provides valid cookie / token / auth header?
You can just pass in the username/token fields the same way you pass in the username/password fields. I don't know if Jenkins has an API for generating tokens. If you find one I'm not against implementing it, but I haven't run across it yet.
I've also looked at this issue and not really found out if Jenkins supports that kind of token-based authentication. You can get the indefinitely living API token from Jenkins' UI or fetch it programmatically as explained here, but that's hacky at best.