Finding dead code in large python project [closed]

Answer 1

You might want to try out vulture. It can't catch everything due to Python's dynamic nature, but it catches quite a bit without needing a full test suite like coverage.py and others need to work.

Answer 2

IMO that could be achieved pretty quickly with a simple pylint plugin that :

• remember each analysed function / method (/ class ?) in a S1 set
• track each called function / method (/ class ?) in a S2 set
• display S1 - S2 in a report

Then you would have to call pylint on all your code base to get something that make sense. Of course as said this would need to checked, as there may have been inference failures or such that would introduce false positive. Anyway that would probably greatly reduce the number of grep to be done.

I've not much time to do it myself yet but anyone would find help on the python-projects@logilab.org mailing list.

Answer 3

Here's the solution I'm using at least tentatively:

grep 'def ' *.py > defs
# ...
# edit defs so that it just contains the function names
# ...
for f in `cat defs` do
    cat $f >> defCounts
    cat *.py | grep -c $f >> defCounts
    echo >> defCounts
done

Then I look at the individual functions that have very few references (< 3 say)

it's ugly, and it only gives me approximate answers, but I think it's good enough for a start. What are you-all's thoughts?

Answer 4

With the following line you can list all function definitions that are obviously not used as an attribute, a function call, a decorator or a return value. So it is approximately what you are looking for. It is not perfect, it is slow, but I never got any false positives. (With linux you have to replace ack with ack-grep)

for f in $(ack --python --ignore-dir tests -h --noheading "def ([^_][^(]*).*\):\s*$" --output '$1' | sort| uniq); do c=$(ack --python -ch "^\s*(|[^#].*)(@|return\s+|\S*\.|.*=\s*|)"'(?<!def\s)'"$f\b"); [ $c == 0 ] && (echo -n "$f: "; ack --python --noheading "$f\b"); done

Answer 5

Try running Ned Batchelder's coverage.py.

Coverage.py is a tool for measuring code coverage of Python programs. It monitors your program, noting which parts of the code have been executed, then analyzes the source to identify code that could have been executed but was not.

Answer 6

If you have your code covered with a lot of tests (it is quite useful at all), run them with code-coverage plugin and you can see unused code then .)