connect-bower

connect-bower

Middleware for serving content from bower packages.

Why

Scratching my own itch really. We use bower for packaging all of our front-end resources, and we wanted a simple and consistent way to access these packages from a browser.

How

Simple. When connect-bower get's hit with a correctly formatted URL it will download (if needed) the correct package (versioned) and then serve any file from within this package.

Use

The absolutely simplest way to use the middleware looks like this:

require("connect")()
	.use(require("connect-bower")())
	.listen(8080);

Examples

The general match rule for path is /:package/:version/:path where

• :package is a bower package name
• :version is a semver version or range or a straight up SHA1 commit
• :path is a path to any file in the package

/troopjs/2.1.0/package.json

Serve the file package.json from the package troopjs version 2.1.0

/troopjs/*/package.json

Serve the file package.json from the package troopjs of the latest version available

/troopjs/~2/package.json

Serve the file package.json fro the package troopjs of the latest version matching ~2

/troopjs/develop/package.json

Serve the file package.json from the package troopjs in the develop branch

/troopjs/7703e4912c46abd81f32aad9886f19fc3c1a1f2c/package.json

Serve the file package.json from the package troopjs as in commit 7703e4912c46abd81f32aad9886f19fc3c1a1f2c