find dead JavaScript code?

Question

We are refactoring a legacy web app and as a result are "killing" quite a lot of JavaScript code but we're afraid of deleting what we think is dead code due to not being sure. Is there any tool / technique for positively identifying dead code in JavaScript?

Answer 1

If you want to automate this I'd take a look at https://github.com/joelgriffith/navalia, which exposes an automated API to do just that:

const { Chrome } = require('navalia');
const chrome = new Chrome();

chrome.goto('http://joelgriffith.net/', { coverage: true })
  .then(() => chrome.coverage('http://joelgriffith.net/main.bundle.js'))
  .then((stats) => console.log(stats)) // Prints { total: 45913, unused: 5572, 
  percentUnused: 0.12135996340905626 }
  .then(() => chrome.done());

More here: https://joelgriffith.github.io/navalia/Chrome/coverage/