jq

jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor akin to sed,awk,grep, and friends for JSON data. It's written in portable C and has zero runtime dependencies, allowing you to easily slice, filter, map, and transform structured data.

Documentation

• Official Documentation: jqlang.org
• Try jq Online: play.jqlang.org

Installation

Prebuilt Binaries

Download the latest releases from the GitHub release page. The platform-specific assets are standalone executables, not archives. On macOS and Linux, rename the downloaded file to jq and make it executable with chmod +x jq.

Docker Image

Pull the jq image to start quickly with Docker.

Run with Docker

Example: Extracting the version from a package.json file

docker run --rm -i ghcr.io/jqlang/jq:latest < package.json '.version'

Example: Extracting the version from a package.json file with a mounted volume

docker run --rm -i -v "$PWD:$PWD" -w "$PWD" ghcr.io/jqlang/jq:latest '.version' package.json

Building from source

Dependencies

• libtool
• make
• automake
• autoconf

Instructions

git submodule update --init    # if building from git to get oniguruma
autoreconf -i                  # if building from git
./configure --with-oniguruma=builtin
make clean                     # if upgrading from a version previously built from source
make -j8
make check
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig                  # on Linux, if jq cannot find libjq.so

Build a statically linked version:

make clean
make LDFLAGS=-all-static

If you're not using the latest git version but instead building a released tarball (available on the release page), skip the autoreconf step, and flex or bison won't be needed.

Cross-Compilation

For details on cross-compilation, check out the GitHub Actions file and the cross-compilation wiki page.

Community & Support

• Questions & Help: Stack Overflow (jq tag)
• Chat & Community: Join us on Discord
• Wiki & Advanced Topics: Explore the Wiki

License

jq is released under the MIT License. jq's documentation is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY 3.0. jq uses parts of the open source C library "decNumber", which is distributed under ICU License