I wanted to share an easy way to make JSON output from the command line more readable. I’ve been using this for a while now and it’s been a huge help. This is for macOS, but I’m sure there are similar tools for other operating systems.

The Problem

I often copy the JSON message from our logging system and paste it into slack or a text editor. The problem is that the JSON is all on one line and it’s hard to read. Here’s an example:

{"level":"info","ts":1631494759.0000002,"caller":"log/log.go:33","msg":"Hello World","foo":"bar","bar":"baz"}

The Solution

With the combination of three commands we can make the JSON output much more readable. The three commands are pbpaste, pbcopy, and json_pp. All three commands are available on macOS by default.

pbpaste | json_pp | pbcopy

The first command, pbpaste, will paste the contents of the clipboard into the terminal. The second command, json_pp, will format the JSON output. The third command, pbcopy, will copy the output back to the clipboard.

The Result

Here’s the same JSON message after running the commands above:

{
   "level" : "info",
   "ts" : 1631494759.0000002,
   "caller" : "log/log.go:33",
   "msg" : "Hello World",
   "foo" : "bar",
   "bar" : "baz"
}

Another Solution

You could also the excellent jq tool to format the JSON output. Here’s an example:

pbpaste | jq . | pbcopy