Finding unused Django code to remove

Question

I've started working on a project with loads of unused legacy code in it. I was wondering if it might be possible to use a tool like coverage in combination with a crawler (like the django-test-utils one) to help me locate code which isn't getting hit which we can mark with deprecation warnings. I realise that something like this won't be foolproof but thought it might help.

I've tried running coverage.py with the django debug server but it doesn't work correctly (it seems to just profile the runserver machinery rather than my views, etc).

We're improving our test coverage all the time but there's a way to go and I thought there might be a quicker way.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Answer 1

pylint is great tool for static code analysis (among others things it will detect unused imports, variables or arguments).

• http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200806/pylint.html
• http://www.doughellmann.com/articles/pythonmagazine/completely-different/2008-03-linters/index.html

Answer 2

You can run the development server under coverage if you use the --noreload switch:

coverage run ./manage.py runserver --noreload