depclear

Find unused and missing dependencies in your Node.js project. Zero-dependency, CI-friendly, low false positives.

depclear is the maintained successor to the abandoned depcheck (archived June 2025, 1.4M+ weekly downloads) for simple projects — without the complexity of knip. It statically analyzes your source, config files, and npm scripts to find:

• Unused — dependencies declared in package.json but never referenced
• Missing — packages referenced in code but not declared

Why another tool?

depcheck was archived in June 2025. It still gets 1.4M+ weekly downloads because nothing simple replaced it. knip is excellent but TypeScript-heavy, monorepo-focused, and needs configuration. If you have a plain Node.js project and just want to know what's unused and what's missing — with zero setup and zero dependencies — this is that tool.

Why low false positives

The #1 complaint about dependency scanners is false positives from legitimate usage the analyzer doesn't understand. depclear handles the cases that break naive scanners:

| Usage | Handled | |-------|---------| | require('x'), import x from 'x', import('x'), export ... from 'x' | ✅ | | Subpath imports (pkg/sub/path) | ✅ | | Scoped packages (@scope/pkg) | ✅ | | Node built-ins (fs, path, node:http) | ✅ (never flagged) | | CLI tools invoked in npm scripts ("build": "webpack") | ✅ | | Plugins/loaders in config files (webpack, jest, eslint, babel, tailwind, vite, rollup, next) | ✅ | | @types/* packages | ✅ (only flagged when TS files present) | | Dynamic requires (require(var)) | ⚠ known limitation |

Install

# Use immediately
npx depclear-cli

# Install globally
npm install -g depclear-cli

# Add as dev dependency
npm install --save-dev depclear-cli

Zero runtime dependencies. Node.js 18+.

Usage

# Check the current directory
depclear

# Check a specific directory
depclear ./my-app

# Machine-readable output
depclear --json

# One-line summary for CI
depclear --summary

# Skip devDependencies
depclear --no-dev

Exit codes (CI-friendly)

| Code | Meaning | |------|---------| | 0 | No issues found | | 1 | Issues found (unused or missing dependencies) | | 2 | Error (package.json not found, invalid arguments) |

Example output

depclear — ./my-app
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
Scanned 47 files · 12 packages used
✗ 2 unused dependencies:
  dependencies:
    • moment
    • request
⚠ 1 missing dependency:
  (used in source but not listed in package.json)
    • axios
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
Found: 2 unused, 1 missing

CI integration

# GitHub Actions
- name: Check dependencies
  run: npx depclear --summary

{
  "scripts": {
    "check-deps": "depclear",
    "check-deps:ci": "depclear --summary"
  }
}

API

const { scan } = require('depclear');
const result = await scan('/path/to/project');
// { unused: [{ name, category }], missing: [...], summary: {...} }

Development

npm test   # 11 tests, zero test deps

License

MIT © Faizan