I'm trying to use the psalm static analysis tool for PHP. It's my understanding that this tool can tell me about unused methods in my codebase. However, if I create a simple test file
#File: src/test.php
<?php
class A {
private function foo() : void {}
}
new A();
and then run psalm
$ ./vendor/bin/psalm --find-dead-code src/test.php
Scanning files...
Analyzing files...
------------------------------
No errors found!
------------------------------
Checks took 0.16 seconds and used 32.694MB of memory
Psalm was able to infer types for 100% of the codebase
or psalter
,
$ ./vendor/bin/psalter --find-unused-code --dry-run --issues=UnusedMethod src/test.php
Scanning files...
Analyzing files...
------------------------------
No errors found!
------------------------------
Checks took 0.05 seconds and used 29.214MB of memory
Psalm was able to infer types for 100% of the codebase
no errors are found.
Why isn't psalm finding the unused method foo
? Is there extra configuration that's needed? Or do I misunderstand what this tool does? My psalm.xml
file is below.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<psalm
totallyTyped="false"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns="https://getpsalm.org/schema/config"
xsi:schemaLocation="https://getpsalm.org/schema/config vendor/vimeo/psalm/config.xsd"
>
<projectFiles>
<directory name="src" />
<ignoreFiles>
<directory name="vendor" />
</ignoreFiles>
</projectFiles>
<issueHandlers>
<LessSpecificReturnType errorLevel="info" />
<!-- level 3 issues - slightly lazy code writing, but provably low false-negatives -->
<DeprecatedMethod errorLevel="info" />
<DeprecatedProperty errorLevel="info" />
<DeprecatedClass errorLevel="info" />
<DeprecatedConstant errorLevel="info" />
<DeprecatedInterface errorLevel="info" />
<DeprecatedTrait errorLevel="info" />
<InternalMethod errorLevel="info" />
<InternalProperty errorLevel="info" />
<InternalClass errorLevel="info" />
<MissingClosureReturnType errorLevel="info" />
<MissingReturnType errorLevel="info" />
<MissingPropertyType errorLevel="info" />
<InvalidDocblock errorLevel="info" />
<MisplacedRequiredParam errorLevel="info" />
<PropertyNotSetInConstructor errorLevel="info" />
<MissingConstructor errorLevel="info" />
<MissingClosureParamType errorLevel="info" />
<MissingParamType errorLevel="info" />
<RedundantCondition errorLevel="info" />
<DocblockTypeContradiction errorLevel="info" />
<RedundantConditionGivenDocblockType errorLevel="info" />
<UnresolvableInclude errorLevel="info" />
<RawObjectIteration errorLevel="info" />
<InvalidStringClass errorLevel="info" />
<UnusedMethod errorLevel="info" />
</issueHandlers>
</psalm>
Psalm creator here - dead code detection only detects unused classes and methods when the entire project is analysed - e.g. ./vendor/bin/psalm --find-dead-code
, omitting src/test.php
.
While private methods and properties are a special case (their non-use can be inferred without checking the entire project), for public/protected methods and properties everything must be consumed.