Finding unused views/partials in Ruby on Rails

Question

I'm currently working on a largish Ruby on Rails project. It's old enough and big enough that it's not clear if all views are actually in use.

Is there any script/plugin out there that can generate a list of unused view files?

Answer 1

Hello there,

Your question made me - as a long-time rails fan - eager to find a solution to your problem, and I sat down and wrote a little script to accomplish just that. I assumed, though, that "unused" means that a view-file is present for which no controller-method is defined (any more). The script does not check, wether the view is never called, because there is no link from the Default-route to it (This would have been far more complex)

place the following script in the application's script folder:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'config/environment'
(Dir['app/controllers/*.rb'] - ['app/controllers/application.rb']).each do |c|
  require c
  base = File.basename(c, '.rb')
  views = Hash.new
  Dir["app/views/#{base.split('_')[0]}/*"].each do |v|
    views.store(File.basename(v).split('.')[0], v)
  end
  unused_views = views.keys - Object.const_get(base.camelcase).public_instance_methods - ApplicationController.public_instance_methods
  puts "Unused views for #{base.camelcase}:" if unused_views.size > 0
  unused_views.each { |v| puts views[v] }
end

(It is kinda hackish and unfinished, but it does the job - at least for me)

Execute it like this (you only need to change the execute-bit the first time with chmod):

chmod +x script/script_name
./script/script_name

Enjoy!

Answer 2

Iterate through your partials, grep (or awk) the project for the name of the file. Adjust your search regex to look for "render :partial" at beginning of line for generic partials (eg, "_form").

Answer 3

Take a look at the following script on GitHub http://github.com/vinibaggio/discover-unused-partials