Pretty Print JSON in the Terminal

I was testing out a web API quickly with curl and it printed minified JSON to the terminal.
Instead of trying to read that densely packed json text, this is how to pretty print the json on the terminal instead.

The tool jq is designed to handle and format JSON data on the command line.

Here’s how you can do it:

Install

Install it using homebrew:

brew install jq

Usage

Use the following command to pretty-print the JSON response from curl:

curl -s <URL> | jq .

• -s: This option makes curl operate in silent mode (no progress meter or error messages).
• <URL>: Replace this with the URL you are making the request to.
• | jq .: This pipes the output of curl to jq, which formats the JSON. (the . is an argument)

Example

curl -s https://api.example.com/data | jq .

This will print the JSON response in a readable, pretty-printed format.

Notes

jq is actually meant not to pretty print json, but to transform and manipulate json data.
The . argument to it tells it to return the input unchanged as the output. This implies (correctly) other arguments change the input json before outputting it.

A fully tutorial on it's abilities is available on it's website: jqlang.github.io/jq/tutorial/