Question 1

How to ignore false positives in Vulture?

Accepted Answer

Vulture offers multiple methods: use whitelist files (recommended), add # noqa comments for flake8 compatibility (F401/F841), or use --ignore-names and --ignore-decorators flags. Whitelists can be auto-generated with --make-whitelist but often require manual tweaking to ensure correctness.

Question 2

Vulture vs pyflakes for unused code detection?

Accepted Answer

Vulture specializes in dead code detection including unreachable code and provides confidence scores, while pyflakes catches broader errors but only reports unused imports and variables. Vulture is better for deep cleanup, but pyflakes is faster for general linting.

Question 3

Can Vulture detect dead code in Flask or Django projects?

Accepted Answer

Yes, but it may struggle with dynamic routing or ORM usage. Use --ignore-decorators for Flask routes (e.g., @app.route) to reduce false positives, and whitelists are essential for handling framework-specific code patterns.

Question 4

How to set up Vulture with pre-commit hooks?

Accepted Answer

Install pre-commit and add a configuration to .pre-commit-config.yaml specifying the Vulture repo and hook ID. Then, define paths and settings in pyproject.toml under tool.vulture to control which files are checked during commits.

Question 5

What's the difference between Vulture and coverage.py for finding dead code?

Accepted Answer

Vulture uses static AST analysis without running code, so it's fast but prone to false positives. Coverage.py requires code execution and tests to identify unused lines, making it more accurate but slower and dependent on test coverage.

Question 6

How to generate a whitelist automatically with Vulture?

Accepted Answer

Run vulture with --make-whitelist to output a whitelist Python file, then include it in subsequent scans. However, the auto-generated file may need manual edits to fix syntax or include missing imports for it to be runnable.

vulture

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