Validating and documenting JSON with JSON Schema

JSON Schema is a way to describe a JSON document. You can think of XML Schema for JSON. It allows you to define required elements, provide validation constraints and documentation.

I think the easiest way to explain JSON Schema is to look at an example snippet of JSON and the corresponding JSON Schema. So, I created an image that shows both and is hopefully self explanatory:

(Click to enlarge, if you are on a mobile device)

A JSON Schema validator can be used to validate a JSON document against a JSON Schema. This can be done online (e.g. https://www.jsonschemavalidator.net/) or using a library of your favourite programming language. In the implementations section of json-schema.org you can find a couple of libraries to work with JSON Schema.

In case you want to copy/paste some of the sections of the image: You can find the example as text on GitHub.