jwt-decode-cli

Decode and inspect JWT tokens from the terminal. No external dependencies.

A fast, zero-dependency CLI tool to decode JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). Inspect headers, payloads, expiry status, and claim details — all from your terminal.

Install

npm install -g jwt-decode-cli

Or run without installing:

npx jwt-decode-cli <token>

Usage

# Pass token directly
jwt-decode eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9...

# Pipe from stdin
echo "eyJhbGci..." | jwt-decode
cat token.txt | jwt-decode

# Show help
jwt-decode --help

# Note signature verification requirement
jwt-decode <token> --verify

# Raw JSON output (no formatting)
jwt-decode <token> --raw

Output

━━ Header ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
{
  "alg": "HS256",
  "typ": "JWT"
}

━━ Payload ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
{
  "sub": "1234567890",
  "name": "John Doe",
  "iat": 1516239022
}

━━ Signature ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
SflKxwRJSMeKKF2QT4fwpMeJf36POk6yJV_adQssw5c

━━ Time Analysis ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  iat (issued at):  2018-01-18 01:30:22 UTC  (7y 2m ago)
  exp:              ⚠ No expiry set — token never expires

━━ Claims Summary ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  sub (subject):   1234567890
  custom claims:   name

Features

• Zero dependencies — uses only Node.js built-ins
• Colored output — syntax-highlighted JSON, color-coded expiry status
• Expiry detection — shows time until expiry or how long since expired
• Stdin support — pipe tokens from other commands
• Claims summary — highlights standard JWT claims (iss, sub, aud, jti, etc.)
• Raw JSON mode — --raw for scripting/piping to jq
• Expired token warning — bold red banner when token is expired
• --verify flag — placeholder with guidance for signature verification

Flags

| Flag | Description | |------|-------------| | --verify | Notes that verification requires a secret/public key, provides guidance | | --raw | Output raw JSON (no colors or formatting) | | --no-color | Disable colored output (or set NO_COLOR env var) | | --help, -h | Show help |

Examples

# Decode a token from an environment variable
jwt-decode $JWT_TOKEN

# Check token expiry in a script
jwt-decode $TOKEN --raw | jq '.payload.exp'

# Decode token stored in a file
cat ~/.config/token | jwt-decode

# Use in CI/CD to inspect tokens
echo $GITHUB_TOKEN | jwt-decode

Security Note

This tool decodes JWTs but does not verify the signature. It is intended for development, debugging, and inspection purposes. Never trust a JWT's claims without verifying the signature using the appropriate secret or public key.

For signature verification, use:

• jsonwebtoken npm package
• jwt.io (web-based debugger)

License

MIT © chengyixu