An Automated Tool For Finding Unused Files, Exports, And Dependencies — Smashing Magazine

Let’s face it. Most of us favor creating new features and user interfaces over maintenance tasks such as code cleanup, project configuration, and dependency management.

Lots of the boring and repetitive things, like formatting and linting, are mostly solved problems with tools like Prettier, ESLint, and TypeScript.

Yet there’s another area that often doesn’t receive much attention: handling unused files, exports, and dependencies. This is especially true as projects grow over time, negatively impacting maintainability as well as our enthusiasm for it. These unused artifacts often go unnoticed because they’re typically hard to find.

Where do you start looking for unused things? I bet you’ve done a global search for a dependency to find out whether it’s still used. Did you know you can right-click a file and “Find File References” in VS Code? These are the things you shouldn’t have to do. They’re tedious tasks that can — and should — be automated.

There’s Got to Be a Better Way

When I was in an expanding codebase, the number of unused files and exports in it kept growing. Tracking them became more and...