refuse

A Swift CLI tool that finds unused visual assets in Xcode projects.

What it does

refuse scans an Xcode project or workspace for .xcassets catalogs, collects all image, color, and symbol assets, then parses Swift source files to find which assets are never referenced anywhere. It understands both string literal references (UIImage(named: "my_icon")) and generated resource identifier references (Image(.myIcon)).

Built for large multi-target apps — the Swift source corpus is parsed concurrently.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/michaelnisi/refuse
cd refuse
swift build -c release
sudo cp .build/release/refuse /usr/local/bin/refuse

Usage

Run from your project root:

refuse

Or pass a path explicitly:

refuse /path/to/MyApp

To delete unused assets after confirmation:

refuse -d

Output

Progress is written to stderr, results to stdout:

Found 1247 assets across 8 catalogs
Scanning 342 Swift files...

Colors.xcassets (1)
  deprecated_red    colorset

Icons.xcassets (2)
  another_unused    imageset
  unused_symbol     symbolset

3 unused assets across 2 catalogs

CI

refuse exits with code 1 when unused assets are found, 0 when the project is clean. Use -s to suppress progress output while keeping error messages visible:

refuse -s

Limitations

• Only Swift source files are scanned. Objective-C and Interface Builder files are not.
• Font assets (.fontset) are not supported — fonts are referenced by PostScript name, not asset name.
• Assets referenced via computed strings or loaded from remote config will be reported as unused.
• Generated resource identifiers (e.g. .myIcon) are only recognised when passed directly as a call argument. Assets accessed via a variable or intermediate expression will be reported as unused.