bower

Bower - A package manager for the web

..psst! While Bower is maintained, we recommend yarn and webpack or parcel for new front-end projects!

Bower offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.

Bower runs over Git, and is package-agnostic. A packaged component can be made up of any type of asset, and use any type of transport (e.g., AMD, CommonJS, etc.).

View complete docs on bower.io

View all packages available through Bower's registry.

Install

$ npm install -g bower

Bower depends on Node.js and npm. Also make sure that git is installed as some bower packages require it to be fetched and installed.

Usage

See complete command line reference at bower.io/docs/api/

Installing packages and dependencies

# install dependencies listed in bower.json
$ bower install

# install a package and add it to bower.json
$ bower install <package> --save

# install specific version of a package and add it to bower.json
$ bower install <package>#<version> --save

Using packages

We discourage using bower components statically for performance and security reasons (if component has an upload.php file that is not ignored, that can be easily exploited to do malicious stuff).

The best approach is to process components installed by bower with build tool (like Grunt or gulp), and serve them concatenated or using a module loader (like RequireJS).

Uninstalling packages

To uninstall a locally installed package:

$ bower uninstall <package-name>

prezto and oh-my-zsh users

On prezto or oh-my-zsh, do not forget to alias bower='noglob bower' or bower install jquery\#1.9.1

Never run Bower with sudo

Bower is a user command; there is no need to execute it with superuser permissions.

Windows users

To use Bower on Windows, you must install Git for Windows correctly. Be sure to check the options shown below:

Note that if you use TortoiseGit and if Bower keeps asking for your SSH password, you should add the following environment variable: GIT_SSH - C:\Program Files\TortoiseGit\bin\TortoisePlink.exe. Adjust the TortoisePlink path if needed.

Ubuntu users

To use Bower on Ubuntu, you might need to link nodejs executable to node:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node

Configuration

Bower can be configured using JSON in a .bowerrc file. Read over available options at bower.io/docs/config.

Support

You can ask questions on following channels in order:

• StackOverflow
• Issue Tracker
• [e-mail]

Contributing

We welcome contributions of all kinds from anyone. Please take a moment to review the guidelines for contributing.

• Bug reports
• Feature requests
• Pull requests

Note that on Windows for tests to pass you need to configure Git before cloning:

git config --global core.autocrlf input

Backers

Support us with a monthly donation and help us continue our activities. [Become a backer]

License

Copyright (c) 2012-present Twitter and other contributors

Licensed under the MIT License

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npm

npm (Node Package Manager) is a package manager for JavaScript, primarily used for managing Node.js packages. Unlike Bower, npm can handle both front-end and back-end packages, making it more versatile. npm also has a larger repository of packages compared to Bower.

yarn

Yarn is a package manager that doubles down as a project manager. It is an alternative to npm and offers faster performance, deterministic dependency resolution, and better security. Yarn can manage both front-end and back-end packages, similar to npm.

pnpm

pnpm is a fast, disk space-efficient package manager. It uses a content-addressable file system to store all files from all module directories on a disk. When using pnpm, packages are linked from a single content-addressable storage, which saves a lot of space and makes installation faster.