JSON & CSV exports

The installed, outdated, and search subcommands render their results as a configurable table. The default is a Unicode-bordered box (rounded), but the --table-format global option lets you swap in any serialization format supported by click-extra, including JSON and CSV for downstream piping.

--table-format is the ad-hoc piping corner of mpm’s data exports. For snapshotting the installed inventory in a re-installable shape, see Snapshot and export; for a supply-chain inventory in SPDX or CycloneDX, see SBOM: Software Bill of Materials.

installed and outdated also accept an optional QUERY argument to restrict the listing to packages whose ID or name matches it (mpm installed rich). The match is fuzzy by default (case-insensitive, tokenized), reusing mpm search’s semantics; pass --exact for a verbatim match.

JSON

$ mpm --table-format json installed > installed_package.json

$ jq installed_package.json

{
    "pip": {
        "errors": [],
        "id": "pip",
        "name": "Pip",
        "packages": [
            {
                "id": "arrow",
                "installed_version": "1.2.3",
                "name": null
            },
            {
                "id": "boltons",
                "installed_version": "21.0.0",
                "name": null
            }
        ]
    },
    "vscode": {
        "errors": [],
        "id": "vscode",
        "name": "Visual Studio Code",
        "packages": [
            {
                "id": "charliermarsh.ruff",
                "installed_version": "2023.6.0",
                "name": null
            },
            {
                "id": "ExecutableBookProject.myst-highlight",
                "installed_version": "0.11.0",
                "name": null
            },
            {
                "id": "GitHub.copilot",
                "installed_version": "1.73.8685",
                "name": null
            }
        ]
    },
}

The JSON output is grouped by manager. Each manager block carries an errors array so callers can detect partial failures without scraping stderr.

CSV

$ mpm --table-format csv installed > installed_package.csv

$ cat installed_package.csv

Package ID,Name,Manager,Installed version
arrow,,pip,1.2.3
boltons,,pip,21.0.0
charliermarsh.ruff,,vscode,2023.6.0
ExecutableBookProject.myst-highlight,,vscode,0.11.0
GitHub.copilot,,vscode,1.73.8685

CSV flattens the per-manager grouping into one row per package, with Manager as a column.

Accessibility

For screen readers, pass --accessible (or set ACCESSIBLE=1 in the environment) to strip ANSI colors and replace the Unicode box-drawing characters with plain +-- / | separators. This switch is independent of --table-format: mpm --accessible --table-format json installed still emits JSON, just without color codes interleaved in log messages.

See also