jsonkit

JSONKit CLI

A professional command-line tool for JSON/JSONC/JSON5 validation, formatting, and inspection.

Installation

go install github.com/forgemechanic/jsonkit/cmd/jsonkit@latest

Or build from source:

task cli:build
# binary is at ./bin/jsonkit

Commands

jsonkit validate

Validate JSON/JSONC/JSON5 files with editor-grade diagnostics.

jsonkit validate [flags] <file>...

Flags:

Examples:

# Validate a single file
jsonkit validate config.json

# Validate multiple files with strict profile
jsonkit validate --profile strict *.json

# Validate from stdin
echo '{"ok": true}' | jsonkit validate

# Machine-readable output
jsonkit validate --format json config.json

Profile auto-detection from file extension:

jsonkit format

Format JSON files while preserving comments and semantics.

jsonkit format [flags] <file>...

Flags:

Examples:

# Format to stdout
echo '{"a":1,"b":2}' | jsonkit format

# Format in-place
jsonkit format --write config.json

# Check formatting (useful in CI)
jsonkit format --check config.json

# Compact output
jsonkit format --indent 0 config.json

# Strip comments
jsonkit format --strip-comments config.jsonc

jsonkit info

Display file structure, statistics, and feature usage information.

jsonkit info [flags] [file]

Flags:

Examples:

# Show info for a file
jsonkit info config.json

# Show info from stdin
echo '{"test": [1,2,3]}' | jsonkit info

# Machine-readable output
jsonkit info --format json config.json

Global Flags

Exit Codes

Profiles

JSONKit supports three parsing profiles:

• strict – RFC 8259 compliant JSON. No comments, no trailing commas.
• jsonc – JSON with Comments. Allows line (//) and block (/* */) comments and trailing commas.
• json5 – JSON5 extensions. All JSONC features plus single-quoted strings and unquoted keys.

Use --profile auto (the default) to auto-detect the profile from the file extension.