deadcode 2.0.0

Find and remove dead code.

deadcode

deadcode package implements DC100 - unused-global-name check for detecting variable/function/class names which are never used in a whole code base. Only globally defined names are being checked. Unused local names can be detected by other tools like ruff.

Installation

pip install deadcode

Usage

deadcode .

Or with command line options:

deadcode . --exclude=venv,tests --ignore-names=BaseTestCase,*Mixin --ignore-names-in-files=migrations

The same options can be provided in pyproject.toml settings file:

[tool.deadcode]
exclude = ["venv", "tests"]
ignore-names = ["BaseTestCase"]
ignore-names-in-files = ["migrations"]

Command line options

Option	Type	Meaning
--fix	None	Automatically remove detected unused code parts from the code base.
--exclude	list	Path expressions to completely skip files from being analysed.
--ignore-names	list	Removes provided list of names from the error output. Regexp expressions to match multiple names can also be provided, e.g. *Mixin will match all classes ending with Mixin.
--ignore-names-in-files	list	Unused names from files matching provided path expressions.
--no-color	None	Removes colors from the output.
--count	None	Provides the count of the detected unused names instead of printing them all out.
--quiet	None	Does not output anything. Makefile still fails with exit code 1 if unused names are found.

Contributing

• make check - runs unit tests and other checks using virtual environment.

Rationale

ruff and flake8 - don't have rules for unused global code detection, only for local ones F823, F841, F842. deadcode package tries to add a new DC100 check for detecting variables/functions/classes which are not used in a whole code base.

There is an alternative vulture package, which provides many false positives. deadcode - tries to find less, but findings are with higher confidence. deadcode - is supposed to be used inline with other static code checkers like ruff.

Known limitations

If the same unused name is repeated in several files - it wont be detected.

Files with syntax errors will be ignored, because deadcode uses ast to build abstract syntax tree for name usage detection.

It is assumed that deadcode will be run using the same Python version as the checked code base is implemented in.

Feature requests

• Split error codes into DC100, DC200, DC300 for variables, functions, class. It will be possible to disable each check separately.
• [+] Add unused class method detection DC310 check.
• Add a check for empty python files.
• Add target python version option, if specified it will be used for code base check.
• [+] Add --fix option to automatically remove detected dead code occourencies
• [+] Replace .* with only * in regexp matching.
• Add a --depth parameter to ignore nested code.. (To only check global scope use 0).