Working with JSON files

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) formatted data is pretty much everywhere. As a a lightweight data-interchange format, it has become very popular. I can see it used for all kinds of configuration files (such as AWS policies, for instance), API response data and log data. 

 json.org states that "It is easy for humans to read and write". Well, anyone who at least once has to debug a long, nested JSON could disagree! JSON is human-friendly only if it is nicely formatted. Fortunately, there are some tools that can help. One of my favorite is underscore-cli, a Node.js tool that can be used as a simple pretty printer. 

In this example I am going to provide steps for installation on Ubuntu. 

Installing Node Version Manager and Node.js

Install curl:

sudo apt-get install curl

Install latest nvm:

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.38.0/install.sh | bash

Install LTS version of Node.js:

nvm install --lts

Installing and using underscore-cli

npm install -g underscore-cli

After issuing the command above, underscore command should be added to your terminal. It can take JSON data as an input and print formatted output.

cat data.json | underscore print --color

 



Alternative tools

Another command line JSON processor is jq. You can install it on Ubuntu with a single command (as long as you have Universe repositories enabled). 

sudo apt install jq

Sample output:


Another option would be just to use Python (not so fancy but does not require any extra software):

python3 -m json.tool data.json



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Study notes: Understanding DNSSEC

Image
DNSSEC Recently I have been researching materials covering DNSSEC as it is an important subject for LPIC-3 Exam 303. DNSSEC has been developed to address security issues of the DNS protocol, in particular preventing DNS cache poisoning attacks . Below I post DNSSEC description from Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which I find useful and included in my study notes.  "DNSSEC strengthens authentication in DNS using digital signatures based on public key cryptography. With DNSSEC, it's not DNS queries and responses themselves that are cryptographically signed, but rather DNS data itself is signed by the owner of the data. Every DNS zone has a public/private key pair. The zone owner uses the zone's private key to sign DNS data in the zone and generate digital signatures over that data. As the name "private key" implies, this key material is kept secret by the zone owner. The zone's public key, however, is published in the zone itself ...
Read more

Splunk: Authentication with Discord? Wht not! (OAuth 2.0)

Image
As some of you may already know, thanks to OAuth standard (which stands for Open Authorization) we don't need a separate account for every single website. It allows us to share information about our Google account with a third party, such as our name and e-mail address. On many sites we are free to use that "Login with Google/Facebook/other" button to sign up and/or login. Thanks to OAuth we don't have to give our password to the app/website. Upon login we are redirected to the OAuth provider site to login there (for instance to our Google account). And now the best part - if we are already logged on the provider site, this is likely to result in instant login on a third party site (sometimes interrupted by a pop up to confirm OAuth scope).  Here is a list of well-known OAuth providers (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OAuth_providers To get better understanding of OAuth 2.0 I would recommend reading these docs for developers: Using OAuth 2.0 to Acces...
Read more

Linux: auditd fundamentals

Image
auditd stands for the audit daemon and it can be used to log events happening on a Linux host. It is a very powerful tool that can enable Threat Detection and/or - as the name suggests - create audit records. It writes to /var/log/audit/audit.log and collects such information as timestamp, PID, UID, Audit UID (auid), session info (ses), SELinux info (subj) and message (msg). Installation auditd is installed by default on most of the Linux distributions. In my case, I'm using RHEL 8 for the test purpose. The package is called audit .  Rules auditd is rule-based software and it support the following three types of rules: control : to configure general settings of the audit system, such as event rate limit, etc. file : file rules or watches can monitor files or directories and are using the following syntax: -w path-to-file -p permissions -k keyname syscall : these rules are loaded into the matching engine that intercepts every single syscall on the system and for this reason they ...
Read more