The jp command is a command line interface to JMESPath, an expression language for manipulating JSON:

$ echo '{"foo": {"bar": ["a", "b", "c"]}}' | jp foo.bar[1]
"b"

If you're a Mac user, you can install via homebrew from the JMESPath Homebrew tap:

brew install jmespath/jmespath/jp

If you're a Windows user, you can install via Scoop:

scoop install jp

You can download prebuilt binaries if you prefer. Check the Release page to download the latest jp executable. There are binaries available for Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD.

For example, to install the latest version on a 64 bit Linux environment use:

sudo wget https://github.com/jmespath/jp/releases/latest/download/jp-linux-amd64 \
  -O /usr/local/bin/jp  && sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/jp

If you have a Go environment installed you can also run: go install github.com/jmespath/jp@latest to get the latest version of jmespath. If you have the repo checked out locally you can also just go build the project:

git clone https://github.com/jmespath/jp.git
cd jp
go build
./jp --help

And finally, if you have a go environment setup, but don't have a workspace/GOPATH configured, you can just run scripts/build-self-contained and it will build the jp executable for you:

git clone https://github.com/jmespath/jp.git
cd jp
scripts/build-self-contained
./jp --help

If you have a go 1.5 environment setup, you can build cross platform binaries by running scripts/build-all-platforms. This will put executables in the build/ directory and each executable will be named jp-<platform>, e.g jp-darwin-amd64, jp-linux-386, etc.

The most basic usage of jp is to accept input JSON data through stdin, apply the JMESPath expression you've provided as an argument to jp, and print the resulting JSON data to stdout.

$ echo '{"key": "value"}' | jp key
"value"

$ echo '{"foo": {"bar": ["a", "b", "c"]}}' | jp foo.bar[1]
"b"

Note the argument after jp. This is a JMESPath expression. If you have no idea what that is, there's a JMESPath Tutorial that will take you through the JMESPath language.

In addition to this basic usage, there's also other ways to use jp. First, instead of reading from stdin, you can provide a JSON file as input using the -f/--filename option:

$ echo '{"foo": {"bar": "baz"}}' > /tmp/input.json
$ jp -f /tmp/input.json foo.bar
"baz"

[[Notice]] the output of the above command is "baz", that is, a double quote ", followed by baz, followed by another a final double quote. This can be problematic if you're trying to use this with other commands that just want the string and not the quoted string. For example:

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/golang/go/events | jp [0].actor.url
"https://api.github.com/users/robpike"

Now let's suppose we want to then curl the above URL. Our first attempt might look something like this:

curl $(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/golang/go/events | ./jp [0].actor.url)

And it would fail with:

curl: (1) Protocol "https not supported or disabled in libcurl

To fix this, we can use the -u/--unquoted option to specify that any result that is a string will be printed without quotes. Note that the result is not surrounded by double quotes:

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/golang/go/events | jp --unquoted [0].actor.url
https://api.github.com/users/robpike

If this is a common enough occurance for you, you can set the JP_UNQUOTED environment variable to make this the default behavior:

export JP_UNQUOTED=true
curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/golang/go/events | jp --unquoted [0].actor.url
https://api.github.com/users/robpike

Also keep in mind that this behavior only applies if the result of evaluating the JMESPath expression is a string:

$ echo '{"foo": ["bar", "baz"]}' | jp -u foo[0]
bar
# But -u does nothing here because the result is an array, not a string:
$ echo '{"foo": ["bar", "baz"]}' | jp -u foo
[
  "bar",
  "baz"
]

You can also use the -u/--unquoted option along with the join function to create a list of strings that can be piped into other POSIX text tools. For example:

$ echo '{"foo": {"bar": ["a", "b", "c"]}}' | jp foo.bar
[
  "a",
  "b",
  "c"
]

Suppose we want to iterate over the 3 values in the list and run some bash code for each value. We can do this by running:

$ for name in $(echo '{"foo": {"bar": ["a", "b", "c"]}}' | \
  jp -u 'join(`"\n"`, foo.bar)');
  do
      echo "Processing: $name";
  done
Processing: a
Processing: b
Processing: c

If you're new to the JMESPath language, or just want to see what the language is capable of, you can check out the JMESPath tutorial as well as the JMESPath examples, which contains a curated set of JMESPath examples. But for now, here's a real world example. Let's say you wanted to see what the latest activity was with regard to the issue tracker for one of your github issues. Here's a simple way to do this:

$ curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/golang/go/events | jp \
"[?type=='IssuesEvent'].payload.\
{Title: issue.title, URL: issue.url, User: issue.user.login, Event: action}"

[
  {
    "Event": "opened",
    "Title": "release: cherry pick changes for 1.5 to release branch",
    "URL": "https://api.github.com/repos/golang/go/issues/12093",
    "User": "adg"
  },
  {
    "Event": "closed",
    "Title": "fmt: x format verb for []byte fails in a recursive call to Fscanf from a scanln call in go1.5rc1",
    "URL": "https://api.github.com/repos/golang/go/issues/12090",
    "User": "hubslave"
  },
  {
    "Event": "closed",
    "Title": "doc: release notes recommend wrong version of NaCl",
    "URL": "https://api.github.com/repos/golang/go/issues/12062",
    "User": "davecheney"
  },
  {
    "Event": "opened",
    "Title": "cmd/godoc: show internal packages when explicitly requested",
    "URL": "https://api.github.com/repos/golang/go/issues/12092",
    "User": "jacobsa"
  }
]

Try it for your own repo, instead of /golang/go, replace it with your own /owner/repo value. In words, this expression says:

• For each element in the top level list, select only the elements where the type key is equal to the string IssueEvent
• For each of those filtered elements select the payload hash.
• Each each payload hash, we're going to create our own hash that has 4 keys: Title, URL, User, Event. The value for each of key is the result of evaluating these expressions in their respective order: issue.title, issue.url, issue.user.login, action.

Ensure that if your expression has spaces you surround the expression in quotes, as shown in the example above.

The parsing and evaluation of JMESPath expression is done in the go-jmespath library, which is a dependency of this project. go-jmespath has extensive testing to ensure it is parsing and evaluating JMESPath expressions correctly.

To ensure that there are no regressions between go-jmespath and jp, the entire suite of JMESPath compliance tests are run against the jp executable.

This repo also include CLI specific test that verify the command line options and output work as intended.

You can run all of these tests for jp by running make test:

$ make test
# CLI specific test cases.
test/vendor/bats/libexec/bats test/cases
 ✓ Has valid help output
 ✓ Can display version
 ✓ Can search basic expression
 ✓ Can search subexpr expression
 ✓ Can read input from file
 ✓ Can print result unquoted
 ✓ Bad JMESPath expression has non zero rc
 - Large numbers are not printed with scientific notation (skipped)
 ✓ Can accept expression from file
 ✓ Can pretty print expr AST
 ✓ Can sort int array

X tests, 0 failures, 1 skipped
# JMESPath compliance tests, using the jp-compliance
# runner from github.com/jmespath/jmespath.test
test/jp-compliance -d test/compliance/ -e ./jp
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OK