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.

pmbarrett314/dead