jq is written in C and has no runtime dependencies, so it should be possible to build it for nearly any platform. Prebuilt binaries are available for Linux (64-bit x86) and OS X.
The binaries should just run, but you may need to make them executable first using:
chmod +x jqjq is licensed under the MIT license. For all of the gory details, read the file COPYING in the source distribution.
If you want to work on jq, grab the source from https://github.com/stedolan/jq.
To build it from a git clone, you’ll need to install a few packages first:
Most of these aren’t necessary if you’re just trying to compile jq from the released tarball - that version has the non-platform-specific build steps already done, so you’ll only need a C compiler and make to finish it off.
For Linux systems, these will all be in your system’s package manager, and if you do development on the machine they’re most likely already installed. I have no idea how to get these installed on OS X, you’re on your own there.
flex and bison are used to generate the lexer and parser for jq, and some python scripts generate the UTF8 encoding tables needed for JSON parsing.
jq’s documentation is compiled into static HTML using Bonsai. To view the documentation locally, run rake serve from the docs/ subdirectory.