Migrating from depcheck

depcheck finds unused and missing dependencies. rev-dep does the same with two checks, and adds the rest of a dependency-hygiene suite.

Why migrate

• depcheck is no longer maintained. Its README now recommends moving on - so a migration is worthwhile regardless.
• Speed. rev-dep is Go-based and runs in a single parallel pass - faster on large repos.
• More than dependencies. rev-dep also covers unused exports, orphan files, circular imports, dev-deps in production, and architecture rules.

What carries over, what changes

• Covered well: unused dependencies, missing (unlisted) dependencies.
• Tooling-only packages. depcheck has specials/parsers to recognize packages used by config ecosystems. rev-dep handles the same gap with explicit hints (pkgJsonFieldsWithBinaries, filesWithBinaries, filesWithModules) - see unused node modules.

Feature mapping

depcheck	rev-dep
unused dependencies	unusedNodeModulesDetection
missing dependencies	missingNodeModulesDetection
ignoreMatches	excludeModules
ignorePatterns	ignoreFiles (top-level)
skipMissing	simply don't enable missingNodeModulesDetection
specials / parsers (non-import usage)	pkgJsonFieldsWithBinaries / filesWithBinaries / filesWithModules

Translating your config

A .depcheckrc:

ignores:
  - "@types/*"
  - "husky"
ignorePatterns:
  - "dist"
  - "*.stories.tsx"
skipMissing: false

becomes a rev-dep.config.jsonc:

{
  "ignoreFiles": ["dist/**", "**/*.stories.tsx"],
  "rules": [
    {
      "path": ".",
      "unusedNodeModulesDetection": {
        "enabled": true,
        "excludeModules": ["@types/*", "husky"]
      },
      "missingNodeModulesDetection": {
        "enabled": true
      }
    }
  ]
}

Running it

# depcheck
npx depcheck

# rev-dep
rev-dep config run

Both exit non-zero on findings. In a monorepo, declare dependencies in the package that compiles the code - see missing or unused dependency false positives.

Next steps

• Unused node modules and missing node modules check options.
• Monorepo integration guide.