dead

dead simple python dead code detection

installation

pip install dead

cli

Consult the help for the latest usage:

$ dead --help
usage: dead [-h] [--files FILES] [--exclude EXCLUDE] [--tests TESTS]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  --files FILES      regex for file inclusion, default: ''
  --exclude EXCLUDE  regex for file exclusion, default '^$'
  --tests TESTS      regex to mark files as tests, default
                     '(^|/)(tests?|testing)/'

run the dead utility from the root of a git repository.

as a pre-commit hook

See pre-commit for instructions

Sample .pre-commit-config.yaml:

-   repo: https://github.com/asottile/dead
    rev: v1.4.0
    hooks:
    -   id: dead

how it works

find all files in a repository using git ls-files and filtering:
- only include files matched by the --files regex
- exclude files matched by the --exclude regex
- only include files identified as python by identify
- classify test files by the --tests regex
ast parse each file
- search for definitions and references
report things which do not have references

false positives

I wrote this in ~15 minutes on an airplane, it's far from perfect but often finds things. Here's a few things it's not good at:

functions which implement an interface are often marked as unused
metaclass magic is often marked as unused (enums, model classes, etc.)

suppressing `dead`

The # dead: disable comment will tell dead to ignore any line which has reportedly dead code.

is this project dead?

maybe.

Metadata

Release files for dead 1.4.0

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for dead 1.4.0
File	Size	Uploaded
dead-1.4.0.tar.gz	6.5 kB	Feb 19, 2021	Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for dead 1.4.0
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
dead-1.4.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl 6.6 kB Feb 19, 2021	Python 2, Python 3	none	any	Details

Total release size: 13.2 kB

Release files / dead-1.4.0.tar.gz

Download URL	dead-1.4.0.tar.gz
Size	6.5 kB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`e02ec4ce22b030c594bd3aba2823bf5f95174c166ac974498d32936db36d22c7`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`9dcfe499fa0a564f9bfcd17b25be7654d9dd5a4efc2f10ced66880b43a298f3c`
Upload date	Feb 19, 2021
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/3.2.0 pkginfo/1.6.1 requests/2.25.0 setuptools/50.3.2 requests-toolbelt/0.9.1 tqdm/4.54.0 CPython/3.8.5`

Release files / dead-1.4.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	dead-1.4.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Size	6.6 kB
Tags	Python 2 Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`08fadc6cf50bca8acae70c3cd176cb7469a0ca0666860a72c2e944aff8775564`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`33b893c7c6b0d8f13014d8548a6f81ba65b044052530cf91275b92f938df75bc`
Upload date	Feb 19, 2021
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/3.2.0 pkginfo/1.6.1 requests/2.25.0 setuptools/50.3.2 requests-toolbelt/0.9.1 tqdm/4.54.0 CPython/3.8.5`