A Rake task that helps you find dead routes and unused actions in your Rails 3+ app.

This Rake task investigates your Rails application’s routes definition, then shows you the unused routes and unreachable action methods.

• Ruby 1.8.7, 1.9.2, 1.9.3, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 (trunk)

• Rails 3.0.x, 3.1.x, 3.2.x, 4.0.x, 4.1.x

Put this line in your Gemfile:

gem 'traceroute'

Then bundle:

% bundle

Just run the following command in your Rails app directory.

% rake traceroute

If you want the rake task to fail when errors are found.

% FAIL_ON_ERROR=1 rake traceroute

Consider you have the following routes.rb and a controller:

# config/routes.rb
YourRailsApp::Application.routes.draw do
  resources :users, :only => [:index, :show, :new, :create]
  match 'products/:id/purchase' => 'catalog#purchase', :as => :purchase
end

# app/controllers/users_controller.rb
class UsersController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @users = User.page(params[:page])
  end

  def index2
  end

  def show
    @user = User.find(params[:id])
  end
end

Running the Rake task will print something like this for you:

Unused routes (3):
  users#create
  users#new
  catalog#purchase
Unreachable action methods (1):
  users#index2

OMG super helpful, isn’t it?

Q: It makes a fuss over the default route at the very bottom. WTF?
A: Please do not use that. Did you read the comment in your routes.rb? Actually this task will help you a lot to remove that evil route.

Q: "command not found: traceroute" Did you mean: tracert
A: I'm afraid you're using the wrong operating system.

Routes prefix with `rails/` are ignored. These are generated by rails in development mode. We don't want to fail the build on these.

Feel free to message me on Github (amatsuda) or Twitter (@a_matsuda) ☇3☇3☇3

• Fork, patch, then send me a pull request.

Copyright © 2011 Akira Matsuda. See LICENSE.txt for further details.