Find unused npm packages in package.json

You can use an npm module called depcheck (requires at least version 10 of Node).

1. Install the module:

    npm install depcheck -g
   
    or
   
    yarn global add depcheck
   

2. Run it and find the unused dependencies:

    depcheck
   

The good thing about this approach is that you don't have to remember the find or grep command.

To run without installing use npx:

npx depcheck 

There is also a package called npm-check:

npm-check

Check for outdated, incorrect, and unused dependencies.

It is quite powerful and actively developed. One of it's features it checking for unused dependencies - for this part it uses the depcheck module mentioned in the other answer.

Check the unused dependencies

npm install depcheck -g
depcheck

Check the outdated library

npm outdated

fiskeben wrote:

The downside is that it's not fully automatic, i.e. it doesn't extract package names from package.json and check them. You need to do this for each package yourself.

Let's make Fiskeben's answer automated if for whatever reason depcheck is not working properly! (E.g. I tried it with Typescript and it gave unnecessary parsing errors)

For parsing package.json we can use the software jq. The below shell script requires a directory name where to start.

#!/bin/bash
DIRNAME=${1:-.}
cd $DIRNAME

FILES=$(mktemp)
PACKAGES=$(mktemp)

find . \
    -path ./node_modules -prune -or \
    -path ./build -prune -or \
    \( -name "*.ts" -or -name "*.js" -or -name "*.json" \) -print > $FILES

function check {
    cat package.json \
        | jq "{} + .$1 | keys" \
        | sed -n 's/.*"\(.*\)".*/\1/p' > $PACKAGES

    echo "--------------------------"
    echo "Checking $1..."
    while read PACKAGE
    do
        RES=$(cat $FILES | xargs -I {} egrep -i "(import|require).*['\"]$PACKAGE[\"']" '{}' | wc -l)
        if [ $RES = 0 ]
        then
            echo -e "UNUSED\t\t $PACKAGE"
        else
            echo -e "USED ($RES)\t $PACKAGE"
        fi
    done < $PACKAGES
}

check "dependencies"
check "devDependencies"
check "peerDependencies"

First it creates two temporary files where we can cache package names and files.

It starts with the find command. The first and second line make it ignore the node_modules and build folders (or whatever you want). The third line contains allowed extensions, you can add more here e.g. JSX or JSON files.

A function will read dependendy types.

First it cats the package.json. Then, jq gets the required dependency group. ({} + is there so that it won't throw an error if e.g. there are no peer dependencies in the file.)

After that, sed extracts the parts between the quotes, the package name. -n and .../p tells it to print the matching parts and nothing else from jq's JSON output. Then we read this list of package names into a while loop.

RES is the number of occurrences of the package name in quotes. Right now it's import/require ... 'package'/"package". It does the job for most cases.

Then we simply count the number of result lines then print the result.

Caveats:

• Won't find files in different imports e.g. tsconfig.json files (lib option)
• You have to grep manually for only ^USED and UNUSED files.
• It's slow for large projects - shell scripts often don't scale well. But hopefully you won't be running this many times.

The script from gombosg is much better then npm-check.
I have modified a little bit, so devdependencies in node_modules will also be found.
example sass never used, but needed in sass-loader

#!/bin/bash
DIRNAME=${1:-.}
cd $DIRNAME

FILES=$(mktemp)
PACKAGES=$(mktemp)

# use fd
# https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

function check {
    cat package.json \
        | jq "{} + .$1 | keys" \
        | sed -n 's/.*"\(.*\)".*/\1/p' > $PACKAGES
    echo "--------------------------"
    echo "Checking $1..."
    fd '(js|ts|json)$' -t f > $FILES
    while read PACKAGE
    do
        if [ -d "node_modules/${PACKAGE}" ]; then
            fd  -t f '(js|ts|json)$' node_modules/${PACKAGE} >> $FILES
        fi
        RES=$(cat $FILES | xargs -I {} egrep -i "(import|require|loader|plugins|${PACKAGE}).*['\"](${PACKAGE}|.?\d+)[\"']" '{}' | wc -l)

        if [ $RES = 0 ]
        then
            echo -e "UNUSED\t\t $PACKAGE"
        else
            echo -e "USED ($RES)\t $PACKAGE"
        fi
    done < $PACKAGES
}

check "dependencies"
check "devDependencies"
check "peerDependencies"

Result with original script:

--------------------------
Checking dependencies...
UNUSED           jquery
--------------------------
Checking devDependencies...
UNUSED           @types/jquery
UNUSED           @types/jqueryui
USED (1)         autoprefixer
USED (1)         awesome-typescript-loader
USED (1)         cache-loader
USED (1)         css-loader
USED (1)         d3
USED (1)         mini-css-extract-plugin
USED (1)         postcss-loader
UNUSED           sass
USED (1)         sass-loader
USED (1)         terser-webpack-plugin
UNUSED           typescript
UNUSED           webpack
UNUSED           webpack-cli
USED (1)         webpack-fix-style-only-entries

and the modified:

Checking dependencies...
USED (5)         jquery
--------------------------
Checking devDependencies...
UNUSED           @types/jquery
UNUSED           @types/jqueryui
USED (1)         autoprefixer
USED (1)         awesome-typescript-loader
USED (1)         cache-loader
USED (1)         css-loader
USED (2)         d3
USED (1)         mini-css-extract-plugin
USED (1)         postcss-loader
USED (3)         sass
USED (1)         sass-loader
USED (1)         terser-webpack-plugin
USED (16)        typescript
USED (16)        webpack
USED (2)         webpack-cli
USED (2)         webpack-fix-style-only-entries