Vulture finds unused classes, functions and variables in your code. This helps you cleanup and find errors in your programs. If you run it on both your library and test suite you can find untested code.
Due to Python's dynamic nature, static code analyzers like vulture are likely to miss some dead code. Also, code that is only called implicitly may be reported as unused. Nonetheless, vulture can be a very helpful tool for higher code quality.
- fast: static code analysis
- lightweight: only one module
- tested: tests itself and has complete test coverage
- complements pyflakes and has the same output syntax
- supports Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.x
$ pip install vulture$ vulture myscript.py
$ vulture myscript.py mypackage1/ mypackage2/
$ vulture myscript.py whitelists/stdlib.py
$ vulture myscript.py mywhitelist.pyThe provided arguments may be Python files or directories. For each directory vulture analyzes all contained *.py files.
After you have found and deleted dead code, run vulture again, because it may discover more dead code.
Handling false positives
You can add false positives (used code that is marked as unused) to a python module and add it to the list of scanned paths (see whitelists/stdlib.py for an example).
Vulture uses the ast module to build abstract syntax trees for all given files. While traversing all syntax trees it records the names of defined and used objects. Afterwards, it reports the objects which have been defined, but not used. This analysis ignores scopes and focuses only on object names.
- vulture can be used together with pyflakes
- The coverage module can find unused code more reliably, but requires all branches of the code to actually be run.
Please visit https://github.com/jendrikseipp/vulture to report any issues or to make pull requests.