JSON has become the de facto standard data representation for the web. It’s lightweight, human-readable (in theory) and supported by all major languages and platforms. However, working on the CLI with JSON is still hard using traditional CLI tooling. Lucky, there is jq, a command-line JSON processor. jq offers a broad range of operations to transform and manipulate JSON based data structures from the command line. Looking at the documentation however reveals an overwhelmingly huge number of options, functions and things you can do with jq.

Writing scripts for continous integration/delivery (CI/CD) pipelines is often done as quick as possible in order to get the pipeline green (i.e. working as expected). Often though, the good engineering practices we put into our applications are neglected for the CI/CD pipelines. When projects and code bases evolve over time this can easily become an error-prone maintenance nightmare that no one dares to touch. This blog post will show some ideas you can use to significantly improve the maintainability and robustness of any CI/CD pipeline setup.