About

• 📟 Are you tired of your UI http client asking you to sign in/sign up so they can create proper workspace for you? (and get your email to send you marketing emails)
• :hourglass_flowing_sand: Are you waiting for ages until your UI http client loads all it’s functionalities and plugins that you don’t need?
• 🗄️ Are you spending lots of time trying to find requests you’ve sent to given api months ago?
• 🔬 Are you searching how to change request method in curl because you don’t use curl that often?
• 📋 Are you working with modern json http api’s?
• :dash: Do you want to write smoke tests for your api?
• 🔗 Need a scripting tool to chain requests?

jsonr is a simple CLI tool for interacting with json http api’s and writing simple smoke tests. It’s available from your terminal anytime when you need it (so you don’t need to switch context) and it’s not aimed to be an ultimate solution for everything. That’s why it’s so simple to use. No more need to browse lots of documentation about tons of features that you don’t need. 5 minutes and you are ready to send any requests.

Run jsonr --help for details.

Prerequisites

Deno runtime environment https://deno.com (required for recommended installation method)

Installation

Option 1: Install via Deno (Recommended)

deno install -g --allow-write --allow-net --allow-read -f -r -n jsonr jsr:@sobanieca/jsonr

--allow-write permission is needed only if you are planning to use -o parameter (write response body to file, check jsonr --help for details)

Option 2: Quick Install Script (Standalone Binary)

If you don’t have Deno installed, you can install the pre-compiled binary with a single command:

curl -fsSL sobanieca.github.io/jsonr/install.sh | bash

This script automatically detects your OS and architecture (Linux/macOS, x64/arm64) and installs the appropriate binary to /usr/local/bin.

To install to a custom location:

curl -fsSL sobanieca.github.io/jsonr/install.sh | INSTALL_DIR=~/bin bash

Option 3: Manual Binary Installation

Download the latest pre-compiled binary for your operating system from the releases page:

Example for Linux x64:

curl -L -o jsonr https://github.com/sobanieca/jsonr/releases/latest/download/jsonr-linux-x64
chmod +x jsonr
sudo mv jsonr /usr/local/bin/

Available binaries: jsonr-linux-x64, jsonr-linux-arm64, jsonr-macos-x64, jsonr-macos-arm64

Updating

For Deno Installations

To update jsonr to the latest version, use the update command:

jsonr update --deno

This will ask for run permission and automatically update jsonr to the latest version from JSR.

For Pre-compiled Binaries

Run the install.sh script to update to the latest version, or download the latest binary from the releases page.

SSL Certificate Issues

If your requests are failing due to certificate validation errors (and you trust target server) you can run temporary command like:

deno run --allow-net --unsafely-ignore-certificate-errors jsr:@sobanieca/jsonr ...

It will display warning about disable ssl verification, but you should be able to perform requests. If you work frequently with such unsafe servers you can consider introducing jsonr-unsafe sitting next to your main jsonr instance:

deno install -n jsonr-unsafe -g -f -r --unsafely-ignore-certificate-errors --allow-net --allow-read --allow-write jsr:@sobanieca/jsonr

Usage

Sample usage:

jsonr -h "Authorization: Bearer MyToken" my-request.http

my-request.http file content:

POST http://my-api.com/endpoint

{
  "someKey": "someValue"
}

Type jsonr --help for more details on usage once you have a tool installed.

Programmatic Usage - chaining requests

You can use jsonr programmatically in your JavaScript/TypeScript scripts to chain multiple requests and handle responses in code.

To get started, generate a template script:

jsonr init
jsonr init ./requests/get.http
jsonr init https://api.example.com/endpoint

This creates a jsonr-script.js file that you can customize. Here’s an example that creates a user and then posts an order using the returned user ID:

// Create a new user
const userResponse = await jsonr("https://api.example.com/users", {
  method: "POST",
  body: {
    name: "John Doe",
    email: "john@example.com",
  },
  status: 201,
});

const userId = userResponse.body.id;
console.log(`Created user with ID: ${userId}`);

// Create an order for the newly created user
const orderResponse = await jsonr("https://api.example.com/orders", {
  method: "POST",
  body: {
    userId: userId,
    items: ["product-123", "product-456"],
    total: 99.99,
  },
  status: 201,
});

console.log(`Order created with ID: ${orderResponse.body.id}`);

Run your script with:

jsonr run jsonr-script.js

The jsonr function is automatically available in scripts run with jsonr run - no import needed!

Working with Large Responses

When dealing with large response bodies, you can pipe the output to grep to filter specific content:

# Search for a specific property in a large JSON response
jsonr my-api-request.http | grep "someProperty" -C 10

# Extract specific fields from JSON responses
jsonr my-api-request.http | grep -E '"(id|name|email)"' -C 2

Hints

• If you want to disable colors (at least for main log messages), you can use:

NO_COLOR=1 jsonr ...

• It is recommended to wrap URLs with quotes to avoid shell conflicts:

jsonr "https://api.example.com/users?filter=active&sort=name"

Contribution

If you want to implement/request new features you are more than welcome to contribute. Please keep in mind that this tool is supposed to be super simple to use and cover ~80% of use cases for playing around with JSON HTTP API’s. Instructions (–help) for this tool should be possible to read in less than 5 minutes. If more features will be added this may be hard to achieve.