Excluding files

outskirts can leave files out at two stages. Files excluded from indexing are invisible: their declarations and references do not exist for the scan. Files excluded from the results are still explored, so what they reference stays used, but nothing is reported in them.

Every exclusion option accepts a Bash v4-style path glob, either absolute or relative to your project directory. Give several globs separated by spaces, e.g. --report-exclude "Sources/Single.swift" "**/Generated/*.swift" "**/*.{xib,storyboard}".

On this page

Excluding results
Including results
Excluding indexed files
Retaining file declarations
String Catalogs

Excluding results#

To hide the results of certain files, pass --report-exclude <globs> (report_exclude). The files are still indexed.

To hide only some kinds of results, give report_exclude an object entry in the configuration file, or append the kinds to the glob with <glob>:kind1,kind2. A kind is the result annotation optionally followed by the declaration kind reported in the JSON kind field, e.g. unused.function (every unused function and method) or unused.var.parameter. Entries without kinds exclude every result, and an unknown kind is a configuration error.

report_exclude:
  - "**/Generated/**"
  - path: "**/SharedKit/**"
    kinds: [unused.function, unused.var.parameter]
  - "**/Legacy/**:unused.var,redundantProtocol"

The result annotations are:

Annotation	Reported by
`unused`	Unused declarations
`assignOnlyProperty`	Assign-only properties
`unassignedOptionalProperty`	Unassigned optional properties
`redundantProtocol`	Redundant protocols
`redundantPublicAccessibility`	Redundant public accessibility
`redundantOpenAccessibility`	Open and final
`missingFinal`	Open and final
`redundantAccessLevel`	Redundant access levels
`emptyExtension`	Empty extensions
`superfluousIgnoreCommand`	Superfluous ignore comments

Including results#

--report-include <globs> (report_include) keeps only the results of the matching files; it supersedes --report-exclude. The other files are still indexed. To keep only the results of the files a branch changed, see Pull request checks.

Excluding indexed files#

Excluding files from indexing means that the declarations and references they contain are not seen by outskirts, which behaves as if the files did not exist. A declaration used only from an excluded file is therefore reported as unused.

--exclude-targets "TargetA" "TargetB" (exclude_targets) excludes all source files of the given targets.
--exclude-tests (exclude_tests) excludes all test targets.
--index-exclude "file.swift" "path/*.swift" (index_exclude) excludes individual source files. The patterns are added to the defaults, **/*?.build/**/* and **/SourcePackages/checkouts/**, which are always kept.

Retaining file declarations#

To keep every declaration of some files, pass --retain-files <globs> (retain_files). This is equivalent to an // outskirts:ignore:all comment at the top of each file.

String Catalogs#

String Catalogs are excluded from the localized strings analysis by their own option, --localized-string-catalog-exclude, see Unused localized strings.