depsnap

Find the dependencies you can safely delete. Your package.json collects cruft — a package you stopped importing six refactors ago is still installed, still audited, still slowing npm install. depsnap finds the ones referenced nowhere in your code, config, or scripts. Conservative by design, zero config, zero dependencies.

npx depsnap

depsnap — 1 unused dependency in demo-app (of 3 checked)

  ● left-pad  dependencies  no import or script reference

Verify before removing — depsnap only flags names it found nowhere · 1 @types/* skipped.

Why another one

depcheck was the go-to for years, but it was archived in 2025 with a long tail of false-positive bugs — TypeScript type-only imports, subpath imports, peer deps, @types/* stubs all getting wrongly flagged as "unused". knip is the powerful successor, but it's a ~150-plugin tool built for big codebases; sometimes you just want a five-second answer to "what's safe to delete?"

depsnap takes the opposite bet from depcheck: instead of trying to prove a dependency is used (and getting it wrong on edge cases), it only flags a package when its name appears nowhere — no import, no require, no dynamic import(), no string in a config file, no CLI in an npm script. Every result is high-confidence removable.

That means it handles the cases depcheck botched, for free:

| Case | depcheck | depsnap | |------|----------|---------| | import type { X } from 'pkg' | often flagged unused | seen as used | | import 'pkg/subpath' | sometimes missed | seen as used | | await import('pkg') | sometimes missed | seen as used | | @types/* stubs | flagged unused | skipped by default | | CLI used only in an npm script (tsc) | flagged unused | seen as used (reads node_modules bins) | | peer dependencies | flagged unused | not checked |

The trade-off is honest: depsnap won't catch a dependency you import but never actually call — that needs full reachability analysis. For that, reach for knip. depsnap is the fast first pass.

Usage

depsnap                 # check ./package.json against this project
depsnap path/to/pkg     # check a project in another directory
depsnap --dev           # also check devDependencies
depsnap --format json   # machine-readable output

Try it on the bundled example after cloning:

node bin/cli.js examples/demo          # → flags left-pad
node bin/cli.js examples/demo --dev    # → also flags unused-dev-tool

How it works

1. Reads package.json for your declared dependencies.
2. Walks your project (skipping node_modules, dist, .git, etc.) and builds a corpus of every .js/.ts/.jsx/.tsx/.vue/.svelte/.json/.yaml/... and dotfile config — but never package.json or a lockfile, since those list every dependency by name and would mask everything.
3. For each dependency, checks whether its name (with import-aware word boundaries, so lodash ≠ lodash-es) appears anywhere in that corpus, in the npm scripts, or as one of its installed node_modules bin names.
4. Reports the ones that appear nowhere.

In CI

depsnap exits non-zero when it finds unused dependencies, so it can keep cruft from creeping back in:

- run: npx depsnap --dev

| Exit code | Meaning | |-----------|---------| | 0 | no unused dependencies | | 1 | unused dependencies found | | 2 | error (no package.json, bad arguments) |

Options

--dev               also check devDependencies (default: dependencies only)
--include-types     also check @types/* packages (default: skipped)
--format text|json  output format (default: text)
-v, --version
-h, --help

Scope

Single-package projects. Workspaces/monorepos aren't resolved across packages yet (run it per-package). It reads package.json dependencies/devDependencies; peerDependencies and optionalDependencies are intentionally left alone.

Also available for Python

pip install depsnap
depsnap

Same checks, same flags, same exit codes — depsnap-py.

License

MIT