🎉 New feature: the poly check command will show unused bricks in projects

[DavidVujic]

Adding a new feature to the poly check command: report any unused bricks in projects.

If a project is including a Polylith brick that is not needed in the project, this new feature will report on it. The feature is available in v1.32.0 of the CLI and v1.39.0 of the Poetry plugin.

⭐ This is an idea from Discussion #357 ⭐

Currently, the command won't exit with a fail code and is only reporting it as information. I've chosen to do so to not cause any issues for teams using the poly check command in their continuous integration setups - and if there are reasons to include seemingly "unused" code in projects. Suggested usage is pre-commit or add it to your existing local developer machine commands.

You can use it in your CI also, but it will only print out information (not exit with a fail code).

Usage, examples:

# poetry
poetry poly check --strict

# uv (or any of your favorite package & dependency management tool)
uv run poly check --strict

When there's a brick not used in a specific project, the output will be:

🔎 Is <the_brick> needed in <the_project>?

What if adding the unused component is intended?

I was considering to add an extra flag to the command, and/or TOML configuration to configure bricks to ignore. But I would rather recommend to add any "unused" components in the base of a project, with a suitable "ignore linting this row".

Example, a base brick defining a component not actually used in code, but still needed in a project:

from the_top_namespace import the_unused_component  # noqa  We want this to be included, because ...

A possibly better solution: if there is code that is used to access features with the command line in a production environment, add a new base! That's a perfect use case for adding another base (an entry point to your service).

I hope you will find this addition useful! Let me know how this thing works out for you, and please let me know if there are any unexpected consequences or issues caused by this new addition to the poly check --strict command 🙏

Implementation details in #360