bower-files

bower-files

Work in Progress! Although tested, this module may not work as expected. Please feel free to contribute bug reports, ideas and/or code when unexpected behavior happens.

Installation

$ npm install bower-files --save

Usage

This module is meant to help you manage your bower components and use them with task runners such as grunt and gulp.

The Problem

So you use bower to manage your project's front-end dependencies. That's great, but then when you want to include those packages in your build scripts, what then? You could have an additional config file that defines which components to use and the paths to them, but that's just one more thing to manage. You use bower so you don't have to have that additional step of managing your front-end libraries.

The Solution

bower-files is a module that allows you to automatically get the paths to your components, and automatically split all of the files by extension.

var gulp   = require('gulp')
  , gutil  = require('gulp-util')
  , concat = require('gulp-concat')
  , uglify = require('gulp-uglify')
  , files  = require('bower-files')()
  ;

gulp.task('libjs', function () {
  gulp.src(files.js)
    .pipe(concat('lib.min.js'))
    .pipe(uglify())
    .pipe(gulp.dest('public/js'));
});

The other thing that it will do is make sure your components are in the correct order with the most dependeded upon script being first.

Other Solutions

Internally, there are other modules that do this same thing. Perhaps they may have suggestions for this module and end up using it:

• gulp-bower-files

Options

You can pass options into the function call to customize what you get:

var bowerFiles = require('bower-files')
  , jsLib
  ;
jsLib = bowerFiles({
  ext: 'js'
});

options.json - The path to your bower.json or other such files

Default: bower.json

If the path given is an absolute path (meaning that it starts with /), then it will read the file given. If it is a relative path, then it will join the relative path with process.cwd(). So the default value ends up being: process.cwd() + '/bower.json'.

options.dir - The path to your bower_components or wherever your have

set up your bower components to go.

Default: bower_components

The same path logic as with the options.json path applies here as well.

options.ext - Whether or not to split up the dependencies by extension.

Default: true

If true, then the resulting object will look something like this:

{
  js: [/* array of javascript files*/],
  css: [/* array of css files */]
  /* any other file extensions that may have been included. */
}

If false, then the result will be an array of all of the files.

If it's a string, then it will return an array of the files with the given extension.

var bowerFiles = require('bower-files')
  , jsLib
  ;
jsLib = bowerFiles({
  ext: 'js'
});

Troubleshooting

There are a few things that can go wrong.

If it cannot find your bower.json or whatever file you determine, the resulting object will be an error like: Error reading project bower.json.

If it cannot find a dependency defined in your bower.json or one of the child dependencies, it's likely because you need to run bower install, but it will return an Error object like: Missing dependency "jquery".;

Occasionally, you will come across a bower component that doesn't have a main property defined in it's bower.json (jQuery didn't used to have it). Because this is how we determine which files to include, it won't include the component, but it will return an error. You can, however, provide it with the correct file.

In your own bower.json, provide an "overrides" property that looks something like this:

{
  ...
  "overrides": {
    "jquery": {
      "main": "./dist/jquery.js"
    }
  }
}

The main property can be a string representing the relative path within the component directory to the main file to be included, or it can be an array of relative paths.

Development

This project uses gulp for task automation.

$ npm install -g gulp

Here are the three tasks available to use:

• gulp hint: runs all pertinent code against jshint. The rules are the ones defined in .jshintrc

• gulp test: runs all tests with mocha for passing and instanbul for code coverage. It generates html files showing the code coverage.

• gulp docs: builds out all of the documentation using docco. Note that you need to have docco installed (npm install -g docco). I at one time at docco part of the dev dependencies, but now I don't. I may be open to putting it back, but I just wanted to keep the package as small as possible.

You can also run npm test, and it does basically does the same thing as gulp test, but an error will be thrown because it does some more istanbul stuff to send data to the coverage server. When this project runs through travis, it also sends coverage data to coveralls.io.

When forking and doing pull requests, work off of the develop branch. I won't be super strict on this, but it's what I would prefer. That way we can keep master clean.