bower – installation and quick start guide

Bower is a package manager for web front end frameworks, libraries, assets and utilities. Bower can manage components that contain HTML, CSS, JavaScript, fonts and image files. Here is a quick start guide on Linux or Mac. Note that bower requires git, node and npm.

1. Install node and npm.
   • Mac: How to install node (node.js) on Mac
   • Ubuntu: How to install node.js on Ubuntu Linux
2. Install bower using npm

   // Skip sudo on Mac if npm is installed as user
   $ sudo npm install -g bower
   

3. Search available packages using bower search <query>

   $ bower search jquery
   Search results:
       jquery-ui git://github.com/components/jqueryui
       jquery.cookie git://github.com/carhartl/jquery-cookie.git
       jquery-placeholder git://github.com/mathiasbynens/jquery-placeholder.git
   ...
   ...
   

4. Init bower project and create bower.json
   

   $ mkdir my_bower_project
   $ cd my_bower_project
   $ bower init
   // You can keep all defaults for the purpose of this tutorial
   $ ls
   bower.json
   $ cat bower.json
   {
     "name": "my_bower_project",
     "authors": [
       "testauthor"
     ],
     "description": "",
     "main": "",
     "moduleType": [],
     "license": "MIT",
     "homepage": "",
     "ignore": [
       "**/.*",
       "node_modules",
       "bower_components",
       "test",
       "tests"
     ]
   }

5. Install bower package and save dependencies in bower.json (in my_bower_project directory)

   $ bower install jquery --save
   $ ls bower_components/
   jquery 
   $ ls bower_components/jqyery/
   AUTHORS.txt	LICENSE.txt	README.md	bower.json	dist		src
   

6. Update packages (based on bower.json)

   $ bower update
   

7. Uninstall a package (say jquery)

   $ bower uninstall jquery
   

   Uninstall a package (say jquery) and save state in bower.json

   $ bower uninstall jquery --save