go-jq is a distribution of jq, that can be built with Go. It does not actually reimplement any
functionality of jq in Go, instead compiling the original source to WebAssembly, and
executing with the pure Go Wasm runtime wazero. This means that go install
or go run
can be used to execute it, with no need to rely on separate package managers such as homebrew,
on any platform that Go supports.
Note that there is an excellent Go port of jq, gojq. It has some small differences from upstream, so this version may be appropriate where those come into play. It also intends to be a case study on bringing tools to Go without a significant rewrite.
Precompiled binaries are available in the releases.
Alternatively, install the plugin you want using go install
.
$ go install github.com/wasilibs/go-jq/cmd/jq@latest
To avoid installation entirely, it can be convenient to use go run
$ echo '{"foo": 0}' | go run github.com/wasilibs/go-jq/cmd/jq@latest
Note that jq is generally used for very small operations, so the overhead of go run
will often be
noticable.
Note that due to the sandboxing of the filesystem when using Wasm, currently only files that descend
from the current directory when executing the tool are accessible to it, i.e., ../sql/my.json
or
/separate/root/my.json
will not be found.