mikefarah/yq

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

15882 stars · 827 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

yq is a lightweight, portable command-line processor for YAML, JSON, XML, CSV, TOML, HCL, INI, and properties files, using jq-like syntax. Written in Go, it ships as a dependency-free binary for reading, updating, merging, and converting between structured data formats.

Use cases

• extract values from yaml files in shell scripts
• convert json to yaml from the command line
• update kubernetes manifest files in place
• merge multiple yaml config files
• query and edit toml or xml files with jq-like syntax
• process csv and properties files in ci pipelines

When to choose

• you need a single dependency-free binary for structured data manipulation
• you want jq-style expressions but for YAML and other formats
• you're editing config files in CI/CD pipelines or shell scripts

When to avoid

• you need full jq feature coverage for complex JSON programs
• you prefer a library API inside a programming language rather than a CLI
• you need schema validation of YAML documents

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

parser serialization cli developer-tools json yaml csv developer-tools files windows cli cross-platform yaml-processor jq-syntax toml xml hcl terraform data-transformation go-binary command-line devops automation linux macos docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="mikefarah/yq")