MR Jira Menu Bar keeps a live count in your menu bar: how many merge requests you have open, how many are ready to merge, and where your Jira issues stand — without switching to the browser.
Code lives in GitLab or on GitHub, tasks live in Jira. Finding out whether something can be merged, or whether QA sent an issue back, means opening several tabs and clicking through filters.
Your merge request already has two approvals, but you won't know until you go and check GitLab yourself.
A tester moved an issue back to “In Progress”. It's easy to miss — and even harder to keep track of how often it happens.
Every “let me just check” pulls you out of your editor. A number in the menu bar answers the question at a glance.
The app runs in the background with no Dock icon. Every 5 minutes it fetches counts from the sources you've enabled and shows them in the menu bar.
Each counter has its own icon, and hovering shows a one-line summary. Available counters:
Clicking the icon opens a menu broken down by source. Every entry opens the matching view in your browser: your merge request dashboard in GitLab, a pull request search on GitHub, or a ready-made JQL filter in Jira.
The menu also shows when data was last refreshed. Press ⌘ R to refresh immediately.
“Rejected” counts every issue that has ever been sent back from testing — even if it was accepted later. An issue counts when:
Status names (“To Do”, “Backlog”, “In Progress”, “Code review”, “Internal testing”) are hard-coded, so the app assumes this Jira workflow.
In Settings you enter a host and a token for each source. GitLab and GitHub can each be switched off with a single toggle, and any of the nine counters can be hidden from the menu bar — it still appears in the menu.
If a source is configured but can't be reached, its menu bar counters turn into a red warning symbol and a banner appears at the top of the menu. An expired token shows up as a clear 401 message.
The other sources keep working — one failing doesn't block the rest.
Every 6 hours the app checks the latest GitHub release. When a newer version is out, a “new version — download” item appears in the menu; it saves the DMG to your Downloads folder and opens it.
Three steps from download to your first counters.
Download the DMG from the latest release and drag the app into Applications.
On first launch a gear icon appears in the menu bar and Settings opens. Fill in at least one source and click “Zapisz” (Save).
Counters refresh every 5 minutes. Click the icon for details, or jump straight to the list in GitLab, GitHub or Jira.
The current release (v1.4.0) is not signed with a Developer ID certificate or notarized, so macOS will block the first launch. When that happens, open System Settings → Privacy & Security and click “Open Anyway” (on older macOS versions: right-click the app and choose “Open”).
Screenshots of the running app, filled with sample data. The interface is in Polish. Click any image to enlarge it.
A native Swift app with zero third-party dependencies. The logic is kept separate from the UI and covered by unit tests.
Requires macOS 13+ and Xcode (Swift 5.9+).
git clone https://github.com/jash90/mr-jira-menubar.git
cd mr-jira-menubar
swift run MRJiraMenuBar # development mode
swift test # MenuBarCore tests
scripts/build-app.sh # .app + DMG in dist/There are no environment variables — hosts and tokens are entered in the Settings window. Quit from the menu (⌘ Q).
Sources/MenuBarCore — Foundation-only logic (API clients, StatusStore, StatusFormatter, settings, updates). Sources/MRJiraMenuBar — the AppKit/SwiftUI interface.
| Source | API and auth |
|---|---|
| GitLab | REST API v4, PRIVATE-TOKEN header |
| GitHub | Search API, Bearer token; /api/v3 path for GitHub Enterprise |
| Jira | REST API v2 (JQL search and changelog), PAT sent as Bearer |
Releases are built by the release.yml workflow, which attaches the DMG to the GitHub release. Developer ID signing and notarization kick in when a certificate is present in the repository secrets — without one, the build is ad-hoc signed.