deadcode
pypi.org
Find and remove dead code.

Sometimes unused class or function manages to slip into code base. Static code checkers like ruff, flake8 does not have rules for detecting such globally unused code.

I tried using vulture, but it has too many false positives to have it as part of CI/CD pipeline.

I have tried to implement my own, more reliable check for global deadcode detection.

Please let me know what you think about it.

  • Jason Novinger@programming.devMEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    This is great! I really appreciate that it returns a sensible exit code to the shell so that it can potentially fail a build. I also like the ability to maintain a list of excluded names in pyrpoject.toml so that you don’t always have to sort through false positives.

    Would love to see some more output options, like maybe --quiet that simply passes/fails and returns the exit code with no output or --count that either just displays a count or includes a count in the regular output. I guess I could always pipe the output to wc -l instead of having --count.

    I’ll see if I can’t get this integrated in our CI system at work this next week.

    • Jason Novinger@programming.devMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Just coming back around on the count thing, in order to use wc -l, you need to ensure that stderr is piped too. Like:

      deadcode . --exclude=*/tests,conftest.py --ignore-names-in-files=core/settings.py 2>&1 | wc -l

      I ran this against a ~8 month old Django project and it turned up 11 unused names, of which 5 were expected and can be whitelisted. Nice!

    • Jason Novinger@programming.devMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Would also be nice if I could use some sort of pattern in the --ignore-names option. Apologies if that’s already there and I missed it.

    • niekas@programming.devOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Thank you for your feedback! Its exactly what I was looking for 👍

      I have already added --count, --quiet options and regexp pattern support for --ignore-names option. Let me know if anything else pops into your mind 😃