Installing jq from Source

Packages built in both Ubuntu and Debian packages lack behind, therefore, to get the latest version of jq, build from source.

There are a few prerequisites to install:

Both GCC and Make are usually installed if you do development, but not Autotools. Luckily, this is easy to fulfill:

1	$ sudo apt-get install automake

Install from source:

$ sudo git clone https://github.com/stedolan/jq.git
$ cd jq
$ sudo git checkout jq-1.5
$ sudo ./configure && sudo make && sudo make install

The installed path is at:

1 2	$ which jq jq is /usr/local/bin/jq

However, this gives me an unexpected tag:

1 2	$ jq --version jq-1.5-dirty

realguess