JSONPath Support

Kubectl supports JSONPath template.

JSONPath template is composed of JSONPath expressions enclosed by curly braces {}. Kubectl uses JSONPath expressions to filter on specific fields in the JSON object and format the output. In addition to the original JSONPath template syntax, the following functions and syntax are valid:

1. Use double quotes to quote text inside JSONPath expressions.
2. Use the range , end operators to iterate lists.
3. Use negative slice indices to step backwards through a list. Negative indices do not "wrap around" a list and are valid as long as -index + listLength >= 0 .

Given the JSON input:

{
  "kind": "List",
  "items":[
      "kind":"None",
      "metadata":{"name":"127.0.0.1"},
      "status":{
        "capacity":{"cpu":"4"},
        "addresses":[{"type": "LegacyHostIP", "address":"127.0.0.1"}]
      "kind":"None",
      "metadata":{"name":"127.0.0.2"},
      "status":{
        "capacity":{"cpu":"8"},
        "addresses":[
          {"type": "LegacyHostIP", "address":"127.0.0.2"},
          {"type": "another", "address":"127.0.0.3"}
  "users":[
      "name": "myself",
      "user": {}
      "name": "e2e",
      "user": {"username": "admin", "password": "secret"}

Examples using kubectl and JSONPath expressions:

kubectl get pods -o json
kubectl get pods -o=jsonpath='{@}'
kubectl get pods -o=jsonpath='{.items[0]}'
kubectl get pods -o=jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}'
kubectl get pods -o=jsonpath="{.items[*]['metadata.name', 'status.capacity']}"
kubectl get pods -o=jsonpath='{range .items[*]}{.metadata.name}{"\t"}{.status.startTime}{"\n"}{end}'

kubectl get pods -o=jsonpath="{range .items[*]}{.metadata.name}{'\t'}{.status.startTime}{'\n'}{end}"
kubectl get pods -o=jsonpath="{range .items[*]}{.metadata.name}{\"\t\"}{.status.startTime}{\"\n\"}{end}"

# kubectl does not support regular expressions for JSONpath output
# The following command does not work
kubectl get pods -o jsonpath='{.items[?(@.metadata.name=~/^test$/)].metadata.name}'
# The following command achieves the desired result
kubectl get pods -o json | jq -r '.items[] | select(.metadata.name | test("test-")).spec.containers[].image'