🐛 production mode broken

[dnalborczyk]

Prerequisites

• I'm using the latest version
• I've read the relevant documentation
• I've searched for existing issues
• I've checked the list of known issues
• I've read the issue reproduction guide

Reproduction url

n/a

Reproduction access

• I've made sure the reproduction is publicly accessible

Description of the issue

The following is broken since knip v5.44.5:

// package.json
{
  "type": "module",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node src/index.ts"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "knip": "5.44.5"
  }
}

// knip.config.js
export default {
  entry: [
    "src/index.ts!",
  ],
  project: [
    "src/**!",
  ],
};

// src/index.ts
import foo from './foo.js'

console.log(foo)

// src/foo.ts
export default true

running `npx knip --production` logs:

Unused files (1)
src/foo.ts

Additional notes:

interestingly, removing the start script from package.json appears to fix the issue.

[lorenzopalaia]

The issue is caused by the ! in your project configuration:

project: [
  "src/**!",
],

The exclamation mark (!) is used for negation in glob patterns, meaning it excludes files from being considered by Knip. This is why src/foo.ts is incorrectly reported as unused.

Questions:

• Is there a specific reason you added ! here?
• If your goal was to include all files, simply using "src/**" should work fine.

Additional Notes:

• There's a small typo: in src/index.ts, you're importing foo.js instead of foo.ts. However, in my tests, this didn't cause any issues.
• The problem is not related to the Knip version—it's purely due to the ! in the project configuration.

Try updating your config to:

export default {
  entry: ["src/index.ts"],
  project: ["src/**"],
};

This should resolve the issue. 🚀

[dnalborczyk]

thank you @lorenzopalaia for looking into this.

an exclamation mark indicates a production mode file pattern. you can read more about it here: https://knip.dev/features/production-mode

There's a small typo: in src/index.ts, you're importing foo.js instead of foo.ts

this is intended, not a typo, as explained here: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/modules.html#modules-in-typescript

Typescript (ts) is transpiling to Javascript (js) on disk, hence an esm module fully qualified path has a js file extension.

[lorenzopalaia]

Alright. So the only thing I can think of right now is a conflict. Using an exclamation mark to indicate a production pattern interferes with standard glob semantics, which interprets it as a negation. This leads to inadvertently excluding files that should be included. Would that make sense?

[dnalborczyk]

Alright. So the only thing I can think of right now is a conflict. Using an exclamation mark to indicate a production pattern interferes with standard glob semantics, which interprets it as a negation. This leads to inadvertently excluding files that should be included. Would that make sense?

I would agree with you here, except that negating files have a leading exclamation mark: https://knip.dev/guides/configuring-project-files#negated-patterns vs. a suffix for the production mode: https://knip.dev/features/production-mode

I'm guessing the suffix exclamation mark was solely invented for knip.

[webpro]

🚀 This issue has been resolved in v5.46.2. See Release 5.46.2 for release notes.

Using Knip in a commercial project? Please consider becoming a sponsor.

[webpro]

Thanks folks!

The short version of the problem: certain entry points should be considered "optional" in production mode (in this particular case: we don't know for sure whether the script node src/index.js targets a production entry point or not). Regular entry points are negated in production mode to make sure such "dev" files and the devDependencies they import won't be reported.

Happy to elaborate more if you have any questions or feedback.