The other day I had the idea to store some JSON as a AWS Parameter Store value.

If you read the parameter using AWS CLI:

aws ssm get-parameters --name /prod/some-json-param

you get something like this:

{
  "Parameters": [
    {
      "Name": "/prod/some-json-param",
      "Type": "String",
      "Value": "{\n  \"server\": \"\",\n  \"token\": \"\"\n}",
      "Version": 2,
      "LastModifiedDate": 1578353153.788,
      "ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:eu-central-1:1234567890:parameter/prod/some-json-param"
    }
  ],
  "InvalidParameters": []
}

What I wanted to get in a shell script, was the JSON representation of Value like this:

{
  "server": "",
  "token": ""
}

Thanks to the popular jq command, this is quite easy:

aws ssm get-parameters --name /prod/some-json-param | jq '.Parameters | .[] | .Value'

That way, we get the value of Value as a string:

"{\n  \"server\": \"\",\n  \"token\": \"\"\n}"

Another call to jq will give us the desired result:

aws ssm get-parameters --name /prod/some-json-param | jq '.Parameters | .[] | .Value' | jq '.|fromjson'

{
  "server": "",
  "token": ""
}

Happy Coding!