Troubleshooting

We can distinguish two types of issues:

• Issues reported by Knip
• Exceptions thrown by Knip

Both of which could be either an issue on your end or with Knip.

You can use —debug and —trace to help troubleshoot issues.

Issues reported by Knip

This indicates a successful run, but there are unused items. Continue with handling issues to deal with unused items reported by Knip.

If you think it’s a false positive and you want to open an issue, please see issue reproduction.

Exceptions thrown by Knip

Knip (or one of its plugins loading a configuration file) may throw an error, resulting in an unsuccessful run. You might be encountering a known issue.

Add --debug to the command for more error details to better locate the cause of the error.

Debug

To better understand why Knip reports what it does, you may want to run it in debug mode by adding --debug to the command:

knip --debug

This will give a lengthy output, including:

• Included workspaces
• Used configuration per workspace
• Enabled plugins per workspace
• Glob patterns and options followed by matching file paths
• Plugin config file paths and found dependencies per plugin
• Compiled non-standard source files

Trace

Use --trace to see where exports are used.

• Use --trace-file [path] to output this only for the given file.
• Use --trace-export [name] to output this only for the given export name.

Use both to be more specific, this is useful e.g. for tracing only the default export of a certain file.

This works across re-exports, barrel files and workspaces. Here’s an example screenshot:

It’s like a reversed dependency graph. Instead of traversing imports it goes in the opposite direction and shows where exports are imported.

Legend

	Description
✓	Contains import and reference to the export
◯	Entry file

Opening an issue

If you want to open an issue, please see issue reproduction.

Understanding Knip

Looking to better understand how Knip works? The entry files and plugins explanations cover two core concepts. After this you might want to check out features like production mode and monorepos & workspaces.

In a more general sense, Why use Knip? explains what Knip can do for you.

Asking for help

If you can’t find your answer in any of the aforementioned resources, feel free to open an issue on GitHub or discuss it in the Discord channel.