Today I needed to validate a json file on one of my servers. It turns out there is a simple nodejs program or actually a linter to do this with.

Just execute the following line and you are in business.

sudo npm install jsonlint -g

This assumes nodejs is already installed. If not, execute the following line.
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs npm

To validate a json file run the following command.

jsonlint -qc settings.analyzer.json

When running the program the first time I ran into the problem that the json file contains comments. Yes, I know this is not in line with the spec, but it is damn handy for understanding the file. So I needed to strip the comments to valiate the file. After googeling around a bit I found an awk command to do just this. Try the following command.

awk '{sub(/\/.*$/,"")}1' settings.analyzer.json > settings.analyzer.json

Now run jsonlint again and it should work.

P.s. I know the title of this post says Linux, but jsonlint will also work under any other system that nodejs runs on.

Hope this saves someone some time.