README

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

bash
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

bash
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

console
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:

console
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