jq: Cheat Sheet

Updated: March 17, 2023 | Published: April 19, 2020

Learn essential commands for filtering, transforming, and manipulating JSON data with this quick reference guide. Perfect for developers and data analysts working with JSON!

jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor. It allows for filtering, transforming, and manipulating JSON data.

General Usage

Pretty Print

Reformat the content of a file to include uniform indentation and new lines to make the JSON content easier to read. The . is the identity filter which produces the input as output and unchanged. By default jq pretty prints output so this is a convenient way to pretty print ant content.

Assume the following is the ugly content of the file example.json:

{
  "name": "John",
  "age": 30,
  "city": "New York",
  "pets": [
    {
      "name": "Fido",
      "species": "Dog",
      "age": 5
    },
    {
      "name": "Whiskers",
      "species": "Cat",
      "age": 3
    }
  ]
}

This command will pretty print the content of the file:

jq . example.json

This is the output:

{
  "name": "John",
  "age": 30,
  "city": "New York",
  "pets": [
    {
      "name": "Fido",
      "species": "Dog",
      "age": 5
    },
    {
      "name": "Whiskers",
      "species": "Cat",
      "age": 3
    }
  ]
}

Extract property

jq .the.dot.path.to.property < some.json

Extract property without quotes

jq -r .the.path < some.json

Minify

Reformat the content of a file to remove indentations and newlines.

Assume the following is the content of the file example.json:

{
  "name": "John",
  "age": 30,
  "city": "New York",
  "pets": [
    {
      "name": "Fido",
      "species": "Dog",
      "age": 5
    },
    {
      "name": "Whiskers",
      "species": "Cat",
      "age": 3
    }
  ]
}

This command will minify the content of the file:

jq -c . example.json

This is the output:

{
  "name": "John",
  "age": 30,
  "city": "New York",
  "pets": [
    {
      "name": "Fido",
      "species": "Dog",
      "age": 5
    },
    {
      "name": "Whiskers",
      "species": "Cat",
      "age": 3
    }
  ]
}

Get first element in array

jq .[0] some.json

Get properties from objects in array

jq '.[] | {.id, .name}' some.json

DataDog, get interesting properties from export as array:

This query takes a JSON file containing Datadog monitor data, and extracts a subset of the fields for each monitor, including the id, name, query, message, created, creator, modified, and type fields. The [] operator selects each object in the array, and the {} operator creates a new object with the desired fields.

jq '[.[] | {
  id: .id,
  name: .name,
  query: .query,
  message: .message,
  created: .created,
  creator: .creator.email,
  modified: .modified,
  type: .type
}]' datadog_monitors.json

Extract the recipients from DataDog monitor TSV:

cut -f 4 datadog_monitors.txt | grep '@' | sed -e 's/[^@]*//' | sort | uniq

AWS

Query Database Instances

Get basic instance information and filtering by security group. The file rds_instances.json was created by running this command:

aws rds describe-db-instances

This query filters a JSON file containing AWS RDS instance data to select only those instances that have a specific VPC security group. For each selected instance, it extracts a subset of the fields, including the DBInstanceIdentifier, Engine, Endpoint.Address, Endpoint.Port, and VpcSecurityGroups[].VpcSecurityGroupId fields.

jq '[.DBInstances[] |
     select(.VpcSecurityGroups[].VpcSecurityGroupId == "sg-731b5d16") |
     {
       db_id: .DBInstanceIdentifier,
       engine: .Engine,
       ep_addr: .Endpoint.Address,
       ep_port: .Endpoint.Port,
       sec_grps: [.VpcSecurityGroups[].VpcSecurityGroupId]
     }
   ]' rds_instances.json

The same above but output as CSV rather than JSON:

jq -r '.DBInstances[] |
       select(.VpcSecurityGroups[].VpcSecurityGroupId == "sg-731b5d16") |
       [.DBInstanceIdentifier, .Engine, .Endpoint.Address, .Endpoint.Port] |
       @csv' rds_instances.json

And finally doing it all in one command:

aws rds describe-db-instances | \
jq -r '.DBInstances[] |
       select(.VpcSecurityGroups[].VpcSecurityGroupId == "sg-731b5d16") |
       [.DBInstanceIdentifier, .Engine, .Endpoint.Address, .Endpoint.Port] |
       @csv'

Query Route 53

The following is an example Route 53 JSON response from an AWS CLI request to get all records for a hosted zone. The example file will be referred to as route53.json and was generated using a command like:

aws route53 list-resource-record-sets --hosted-zone-id ABC123 > route53.json

This is example output:

{
  "ResourceRecordSets": [
    {
      "Name": "example.com.",
      "Type": "A",
      "TTL": 300,
      "ResourceRecords": [
        {
          "Value": "10.0.0.1"
        },
        {
          "Value": "10.0.0.2"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "Name": "www.example.com.",
      "Type": "CNAME",
      "TTL": 300,
      "ResourceRecords": [
        {
          "Value": "example.com"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "Name": "alias.example.com.",
      "Type": "A",
      "AliasTarget": {
        "HostedZoneId": "Z2FDTNDATAQYW2",
        "DNSName": "d1234.cloudfront.net",
        "EvaluateTargetHealth": false
      }
    },
    {
      "Name": "example.com.",
      "Type": "NS",
      "TTL": 172800,
      "ResourceRecords": [
        {
          "Value": "ns-1234.awsdns-12.org."
        },
        {
          "Value": "ns-5678.awsdns-56.co.uk."
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "Name": "example.com.",
      "Type": "SOA",
      "TTL": 900,
      "ResourceRecords": [
        {
          "Value": "ns-1234.awsdns-12.org. awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com. 1 7200 900 1209600 86400"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "Name": "mail.example.com.",
      "Type": "MX",
      "TTL": 300,
      "ResourceRecords": [
        {
          "Value": "10 mail.example.com."
        },
        {
          "Value": "20 alt1.mail.example.com."
        },
        {
          "Value": "30 alt2.mail.example.com."
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "Name": "example.com.",
      "Type": "TXT",
      "TTL": 300,
      "ResourceRecords": [
        {
          "Value": "\"v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all\""
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

The following query takes the Route 53 example JSON file, selects all the ResourceRecordSet objects in the file, filters out records of type NS and SOA, and extracts the Name, Type, and Value fields of each record. If the record has multiple Value fields, they are concatenated into a single comma-separated string. The resulting output is formatted as a TSV string.

jq -r '.ResourceRecordSets[] |
       select(.Type != "NS" and .Type != "SOA") |
       [.Name, .Type,
        if .ResourceRecords
          then (.ResourceRecords | map(.Value) | join(","))
          else .AliasTarget.DNSName
        end] |
        @tsv' route53.json

This is the output:

example.com.	A	10.0.0.1,10.0.0.2
www.example.com.	CNAME	example.com
alias.example.com.	A	d1234.cloudfront.net
mail.example.com.	MX	10 mail.example.com.,20 alt1.mail.example.com.,30 alt2.mail.example.com.
example.com.	TXT	"v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all"

Here's what the query is doing, step by step:

  1. .ResourceRecordSets[] - This part of the query selects all the ResourceRecordSets objects in the JSON file and iterates over them.
  2. select(.Type != "NS" and .Type != "SOA") - This part of the query filters out records of type NS and SOA from the output. The select() function takes a boolean expression as its argument, and returns only the elements of the array that evaluate to true. In this case, the expression (.Type != "NS" and .Type != "SOA") evaluates to true for all records that are not of type NS or SOA.
  3. [.Name, .Type, if .ResourceRecords then (.ResourceRecords | map(.Value) | join(",")) else .AliasTarget.DNSName end] - This part of the query creates an array that includes the Name, Type, and Value fields of each ResourceRecordSet object. If the record has ResourceRecords, the query maps the Value field of each ResourceRecord object to an array of strings, and then joins them into a comma-separated string using the join() function. If the record has an AliasTarget, the query extracts the DNSName field under the AliasTarget object. The resulting array contains the Name, Type, and Value fields of the record.
  4. @tsv - This part of the query formats the output as a tab-separated value (TSV) string. The fields in the array created in step 3 are separated by tabs rather than commas.
  5. -r - This option tells jq to output the result as raw text rather than JSON.