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How It Works

Prune answers one question: which declared classes are never referenced? It does this with a single static pass over your code — it never executes anything.

The pipeline​

config → discover files → parse (AST) → collect declarations
                                      → collect references
                                      → declarations − references = orphans
                                      → format report

1. Configuration​

Prune loads prune.neon / prune.neon.dist (or a --config file) and merges it with command-line arguments. The result determines the paths, exclusions, extensions, output format, and Blade settings for the run. See Configuration File.

2. File discovery​

Using Symfony Finder, Prune collects every file in the configured paths whose extension matches extensions and whose path is not in excludePaths.

3. AST parsing​

Each file is parsed exactly once into an abstract syntax tree by nikic/php-parser. The tree is then walked by a single traverser carrying several visitors, with a NameResolver prepended so that short names are resolved to fully qualified class names (FQCNs).

4. Building the class map​

The ClassMapBuilder visitor records every declared class, interface, trait, and enum — storing each FQCN together with the file and line where it is declared.

5. Scanning references​

The ReferenceScanner visitor collects every place a class is used. It recognizes a broad set of reference kinds — see What Gets Detected for the full list, which includes extends/implements, new, static access, type hints, attributes, docblocks, route strings, and selected function calls such as class_exists().

6. Detecting orphans​

The OrphanDetector performs a set difference:

orphans = declared classes − referenced classes

Any declared FQCN that never appears in the reference set is reported as an orphan, along with its file and line.

7. Blade analysis (optional)​

When enabled, Prune separately discovers all Blade templates, collects view references from PHP view()/Route::view() calls and Blade directives, and reports views that are never referenced. See Blade Analysis.

8. Formatting the report​

Finally the report — class orphans plus Blade orphans — is rendered by the selected formatter (console, json, or html) and either printed or written to disk. See Output Formats.

Why a single pass​

All visitors share one traversal of each file's AST, so a file is read and parsed only once even though several kinds of information are extracted from it. This keeps analysis fast on large codebases.

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