DevOps & Terminal Engineering

JQ Format JSON Online & Query Tester

Format, query, and transform JSON using familiar jq filter syntax. Test filters like .[], map(.name), select(...), and keys directly in your browser.

jq ' '

Common Filters:

Raw JSON Input

JQ Output

Working with JQ in Modern DevOps Pipelines

The jq utility is the definitive tool for shell scripting, CI/CD pipeline automation (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI), and Kubernetes log diagnostics. It operates as a stream filter: taking JSON as standard input, applying transformations, and printing standard output.

1. Everyday JQ Command-Line Patterns

# Format raw API response:
curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/stedolan/jq | jq .

# Extract list of names:
cat users.json | jq '.[] | .name'

# Filter active admins:
cat users.json | jq '.[] | select(.role == "admin" and .active == true)'

Frequently Asked Questions

jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor. It is widely used by DevOps engineers, backend developers, and sysadmins to slice, filter, map, and pretty-print JSON files and API streams directly from Unix terminals.

Simply pass the identity filter . to jq: cat data.json | jq . or jq . data.json. To format in-place without color codes, use jq -M . data.json > formatted.json.

It iterates through an array of objects, tests each object's active property, and returns a filtered array containing only the objects where active evaluates to true.

Yes. All JSON evaluation and jq filter operations run 100% client-side in your web browser. No logs or payload contents are sent over the network.