JSON-TOOLS

Work on top of the work of Viacheslav Poturaev - JSON-diff CLI tool 👏 👏

The idea of these scripts are simple: make easier to work with .json files.

How to install

Download a copy of this repository and make sure to add the target folder to your PATH environment variable. So, whatever the active folder, you only have to indicate the name of the script you want to run e.g. json-diff for it to be executed.

After the download, please run composer install (yes, you need composer if you don't have it already) to install dependencies.

Scripts

json-diff

You've a file called f.i. settings.json with a big number of settings and their values and in a second project, you have the same file but probably not with the same values.

How to compare the two files and only display values in the second file that have been updated i.e. different in the first settings.json file?

In my case, my need is slightly different: one of my applications is generic and totally driven from a file named hooks.json (say /git_hooks/hooks.json).

When this file is present in another folder (say /another_application/hooks.json), if I start my git_hooks program, this is the file that will be used. If the hooks.json file isn't present in that folder, the global /git_hooks/hooks.json file will be used.

So /another_application/hooks.json is just a copy of /git_hooks/hooks.json with, probably, adjusted settings.

Having dozens of applications, it becomes difficult to know what changes would have been made in each file compared to the global file.

The json-diff script comes to fill this need.

The output will be something like:

{
    "version":  "1.0.1",
    "tasks":  {
        "xmlprettier":  {
            "enabled":  0
        }
    }
}

Only updated keys will be displayed.

If the /git_hooks/hooks.json file contains 1,000 lines and /another_application/hooks.json has adapted only two values, then only these values are displayed, just like illustrated above.

json-diff -help

JSON CLI tool - Hight differences in the second file

Usage: json-diff [-help] <original.json> <compared.json>

-help           Show this screen

<original.json> Name of the original JSON file, the one used as the template

<compared.json> Name of the 'Compared with' file, the one in which changes will be inspected

Some examples
-------------

json-diff original.json updated.json  Show the list of keys from updated.json that have been modified i.e. whose value is different in the original file.

Run json-diff samples\original.json samples\updated.json for a real example

Some command line examples

json-diff samples\original.json samples\updated.json

Take a look to the /samples/original.json and /samples/updated.json files to see how it works.