How To Install Jq on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Jq on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) has become a widely adopted data format for exchanging information between applications and servers. When working with JSON data on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, a powerful tool called jq can greatly simplify the process of parsing, manipulating, and extracting information from JSON files.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Jq on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• An active internet connection. You’ll need an internet connection to download the necessary packages and dependencies for Jq.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Jq on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install wget apt-transport-https gnupg2 software-properties-common

Step 2. Installing Jq on Ubuntu 22.04.

By default, Jq is available on Ubuntu 22.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to download the latest version of the Jq package from the official page to your Ubuntu system:

sudo apt install jq

Once the installation is complete, you can verify that Jq has been installed correctly by running the following command in the terminal:

jq --version

Step 3. Using Jq.

Jq has a wide range of command-line options that can be used to manipulate JSON data. Some of the most commonly used options include:

• jq '.' : this command is used to pretty-print JSON data.
• jq 'keys' : this command is used to extract the keys from a JSON object.
• jq '.[]' : this command is used to extract the values from a JSON array.
• jq 'del(.key)' : this command is used to delete a key-value pair from a JSON object.

Step 4. Testing Jq.

Let’s say we have JSON data stored in the test.json file:

echo '{"status":"success","data":[{"name":"meilana","age":25},{"name":"maria","age":24}]}' > test.json

The Jq tool supports various filters that can be applied to JSON data. For example, the dot . filter prints unchanged but nicely formatted JSON:

jq '.' test.json

Output:

{
  "status": "success",
  "data": [
    {
      "name": "meilana",
      "age": 25
    },
    {
      "name": "maria",
      "age": 24
    }
  ]
}

We can retrieve a particular field of a JSON object or an element of a JSON array as follows:

jq '.data[1].name' test.json

Output:

"meilana"

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Jq. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Jq on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Jq website.