Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, un-opinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management.

Bower depends on Node and npm. It’s installed globally using npm:

npm install -g bower

To register a new package:

  • There must be a valid manifest JSON in the current working directory.
  • Your package should use semver Git tags.
  • Your package must be available at a Git endpoint (e.g., GitHub); remember to push your Git tags!

You can use bower init to generate the valid manifest json

bower init

It will produce something like this:

{
  "name": "appName",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "main": [
    "app.js"
  ],
  "ignore": [
    "**/.*",
    "node_modules",
    "components"
  ],
  "dependencies": {
    "myDep": "latest",
    "myDep2": "2.0.0"
  }
}

Then to register your app:

bower register [app name] [git endpoint]

// example:
bower register raphael.backbone git://github.com/tomasAlabes/backbone.raphael.git
Registering a package will make it visible and installable via the registry.
Proceed (y/n)? y
registered backbone.raphael to git://github.com/tomasAlabes/backbone.raphael.git

And now your library is ready to be used via bower :) Use my library as an example if you want: backbone.raphael

Enjoy!

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Tomas Alabes

Software Engineer, author, blogger and obsessive learner, from Argentina living in Silicon Valley


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