bower/bower

Bower is a package manager for front-end web development, written in JavaScript and run from the command line. It downloads and keeps track of the third-party JavaScript, CSS, fonts, and other browser-side assets that a website needs, instead of copying those files into the project by hand. The README opens with an important caveat: while Bower is still maintained, the project itself now recommends Yarn together with webpack or Parcel for new front-end projects, acknowledging that the JavaScript build ecosystem has moved on. The core idea is that Bower offers a generic, unopinionated solution for front-end packages. There are no system-wide installs, packages are not shared between apps, and the dependency tree is kept flat rather than nested. This contrasted with the deeply nested install layout of npm when Bower was popular. Bower runs over Git and is package-agnostic, so a component can include any kind of asset and use any module style such as AMD or CommonJS. Installation is a one-liner with npm: npm install -g bower. The README mentions that Node.js, npm, and Git all need to be installed first, because Bower uses Git under the hood to fetch packages. Usage is shown through a few common commands. Running bower install reads a bower.json file in your project and pulls in everything listed there. Running bower install with a package name and the --save flag installs that package and adds it to bower.json, and you can pin a specific version by appending #version. Uninstalling is a single bower uninstall command. The README is explicit that components fetched by Bower should not be served directly from a website. Instead it recommends running them through a build tool such as Grunt or gulp, or a module loader like RequireJS, both for performance and to avoid serving accidental scripts like a stray upload.php that a package might contain. It also warns never to run Bower with sudo, since it is a user-level command. The rest of the README covers platform-specific notes: prezto and oh-my-zsh users need to alias bower or escape version hashes; Windows users need Git for Windows configured with the right options; Ubuntu users may need to symlink nodejs to node. Configuration lives in a .bowerrc JSON file documented on bower.io. Support is offered through StackOverflow and the GitHub issue tracker, and the project takes donations through Open Collective.