Two Years

Published: 2024-10-04

Exactly two years ago the first commit was pushed to GitHub and the first version of Knip was published to the npm registry. The name was initially Exportman! We’ve come a loooong way… The JavaScript ecosystem is highly dynamic and I’ve been crazy enough to even start, try and keep up with it! But here we are.

October 4th is World Animal Day, so there was really no choice but bring in the crazy mascot that early adopters may remember:

Crazy cow with orange scissors in Van Gogh style

Today we celebrate an unknown but CRAZY amount of clutter removed from so many codebases with Knip’s help. Every single day I see many of those little red blocks for thousands of lines of deleted code and dependencies. Call me crazy, but to me this is pure joy and never gets old! 🟩 🟥 🟥 🟥 🟥

Smiling faces

The actual amount of code and dependencies removed and the number of smiling faces this brings is what matters most, but also remain a good mystery. Clearly more and more projects add Knip to their projects and CI workflows to keep ever-growing codebases tidy. It’s wonderful to see if Knip plays its part in today’s ecosystem to help with that. Thanks for bearing with me, here’s to a lot more little red blocks in your PRs! 🟩 🟥 🟥 🟥 🟥

Updates

Why not throw in some freshly cooked updates in v5.31.0 for you while we’re at it:

The auto-fix feature has been completely revamped, it’s much better and a lot more comprehensive! You have to see it to believe it.
Knip has upgraded to Jiti v2, resolving a bunch of known issues when loading configuration files authored in TypeScript and ESM, such as:

Cannot use 'import.meta' outside a module
await is only valid in async functions and the top level bodies of modules
Unexpected identifier 'Promise'
Reflect.metadata is not a function

And that pesky “CJS build of Vite’s Node API is deprecated” warning is finally gone!

Thanks to everyone involved in making this happen, it’s truly much appreciated.

Stable

If you haven’t tried Knip recently, it’s worth taking another look! Version 5 was released 8 months ago, and even though there were no breaking changes, it includes many enhancements. In fact, Knip has been largely stable since version 3, which came out a year ago. Many releases have a compound effect, as Knip has kept the pace for two years now.