Command Line Tool

The package includes a command-line tool for transforming XML documents.

The command line tool needs a DOM implementation, so install jsdom next to the package. It is an optional peer dependency: library users do not need it. Without it, xslt exits with an explanation instead of a stack trace.

Standalone executables

Every GitHub release ships self-contained xslt executables that need no Node.js, npm or jsdom: xslt-linux-x64, xslt-linux-arm64, xslt-darwin-x64, xslt-darwin-arm64 and xslt-windows-x64.exe, plus checksums.sha256. They embed Node.js as a Single Executable Application together with jsdom, so they behave exactly like npx xslt.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spagu/XSLT-Processor/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
# pin a version or location:
XSLT_VERSION=1.2.1 XSLT_INSTALL_DIR=$HOME/.local/bin bash install.sh

The installer detects the operating system and CPU, downloads over HTTPS and refuses to install when the SHA-256 checksum does not match. Manual install on Linux (on macOS use shasum -a 256 --check --ignore-missing):

curl -fsSLO https://github.com/spagu/XSLT-Processor/releases/latest/download/xslt-linux-x64
curl -fsSLO https://github.com/spagu/XSLT-Processor/releases/latest/download/checksums.sha256
sha256sum --check --ignore-missing checksums.sha256
install -m 0755 xslt-linux-x64 /usr/local/bin/xslt
xslt --version

On Windows, download xslt-windows-x64.exe, compare (Get-FileHash xslt-windows-x64.exe).Hash with its line in checksums.sha256, rename it to xslt.exe and put it on your PATH.

• Linux builds need glibc 2.28 or newer; on Alpine (musl) use npm instead.
• The executables are about 100 to 150 MB. Start-up takes about 25 ms and a small transformation about 250 ms, most of it jsdom initialisation.
• macOS executables are ad-hoc signed and the Windows one is unsigned, so Gatekeeper or SmartScreen may ask for confirmation.
• Build them locally with make binaries (host platform, Node.js 25.5 or newer) or node scripts/binaries/build.mjs --target all.

Examples

# Global installation
npm install -g @tradik/xslt-processor jsdom

# Transform XML with XSLT
xslt data.xml template.xsl

# Save output to file
xslt data.xml template.xsl -o result.html

# With parameters
xslt data.xml template.xsl -p title="My Page" -p count=10

# Format output with indentation
xslt data.xml template.xsl -f -o output.html

# Override the output method and drop the XML declaration
xslt data.xml template.xsl --method text
xslt data.xml template.xsl --no-declaration

The output is serialized according to the xsl:output element of the stylesheet (see Serializing output); the options below override individual xsl:output settings.

Base directory

All file arguments must live inside the current working directory (symbolic links are resolved first). To work with files elsewhere, run the command from that directory or point XSLT_BASE_DIR at it:

XSLT_BASE_DIR=/srv/data xslt /srv/data/in.xml /srv/data/t.xsl -o /srv/data/out.html

Includes and document()

xsl:include, xsl:import and document() are resolved relative to the stylesheet that references them (relative paths, absolute paths and file: URLs). The files they load must stay inside the same base directory; anything outside it, and any http:/https: URI, is refused. A stylesheet include that cannot be loaded stops the run with an error, while a document() that cannot be loaded yields an empty node-set and a one-line warning on stderr.

Input encodings

Input files (the XML document, the stylesheet, included stylesheets and document() files) are decoded following XML 1.0 Appendix F: a byte order mark (UTF-8, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE) wins, then the encoding of the XML declaration, otherwise UTF-8. Any WHATWG encoding label is accepted, e.g. ISO-8859-1, windows-1252, ISO-8859-2, Shift_JIS; an unknown label is reported as an error.

Output

The result is written to stdout byte for byte, exactly as with -o; only when stdout is an interactive terminal is a final newline added if missing.

CLI Options

A complete example is in Complete Example.

DOM implementation

XSLT_DOM selects the DOM implementation: jsdom (the default when installed) or xmldom (@xmldom/xmldom 0.9 or newer: XML only, about 6 times faster start-up and about 2.5 times faster transformations, but entities declared in the internal DTD subset are not expanded). Without jsdom installed the CLI uses @xmldom/xmldom, so install one of them next to the package (npm install -g jsdom or npm install -g @xmldom/xmldom). The standalone executables contain both.