How to Make JSON Data Pretty in the Shell Output

Sometimes I use curl to test an API endpoint, and the JSON data I got back is not formatted. There are two quick ways to format the JSON data in the shell output.

python

If you have python installed, check with type python. You can either pipe the data to the json.tool module:

curl https://swapi.dev/api/people/1/ | python -m json.tool

Or format a file and print it to the output:

python -m json.tool filename.json

jsome

jsome is an NPM package and can be installed at its NPM package page.