Search code examples
visual-studionuget

How can you find unused NuGet packages in solution?

How can you find the unused NuGet packages in a solution?

I've got a number of solutions where there are a lot of installed packages, and a large number of them are flagged as having updates.

However, I'm concerned there may be breaking changes, so I first want to clean up by removing any unused packages.

Solution

  • ReSharper 2016.1 has a feature to remove unused NuGet.

    It can be run on a solution and on each project in a solution and it does the following things:

    1. Analyze your code and collecting references to assemblies.
    2. Build NuGet usage graph based on usages of assemblies.
    3. Packages without content files, unused itself and without used dependencies are assumed as unused and suggested to remove.

    Unfortunately, this doesn't work for project.json projects (RSRP-454515) and ASP.NET core projects (RSRP-459076)