depcheck

Keeping track of your dependencies is not an easy task, especially if you have a big application. Are you sure you are using all of the dependencies you define in your package.json file? One way to find out is to look at all your files and check which modules you are using, but that's too time consuming. Or maybe you can do a grep on all the files of your project, and then some grep -v to remove the junk. But that's a hassle too.

And that is why depcheck exists.

It's a nifty little tool that looks at your package.json file and scans your code in order to find any unused dependencies.

Works with grunt dependencies too!

Installation

npm install depcheck -g

Usage

As easy as depcheck [DIRECTORY].

Where DIRECTORY is the root directory of your application (where the package.json is). This will list all the unused dependencies in your code if any.

Options

--no-dev : by default depcheck looks at dependencies and devDependencies, this flag will tell it not to look at "devDependencies".

Or, as a lib:

var path = require("path");
var depcheck = require("depcheck");
var options = {
  "withoutDev": false, // Check against devDependencies too
  "ignoreDirs": [      // Pathnames to ignore
    "sandbox",
    "dist",
    "bower_components"
  ],
  "ignoreMatches": [  // Ignore dependencies that match these minimatch patterns
    "grunt-*"
  ]
};
var root = path.resolve("some path");

depcheck(root, options, function(unused) {
  console.log(unused.dependencies);
  console.log(unused.devDependencies);
  console.log(unused.invalidFiles); // JS files that couldn't be parsed
});

TODOs

Well, it's more of a "What do you think guys?".

There are a couple of things I would like to do if anyone is interested:

• There could be false positives, we could have a white list of modules that you know you are using and that depcheck can't find in your code
• A grunt-contrib-depcheck would be nice

License

MIT