| title | layout | is_home |
|---|---|---|
Bower |
default |
true |
Web sites are made of lots of things — frameworks, libraries, assets, utilities, and rainbows. Bower manages all these things for you.
Bower works by fetching and installing packages from all over, taking care of hunting, finding, downloading, and saving the stuff you're looking for. Bower keeps track of these packages in a manifest file, bower.json. How you use packages is up to you. Bower provides hooks to facilitate using packages in your tools and workflows.
Bower is optimized for the front-end. Bower uses a flat dependency tree, requiring only one version for each package, reducing page load to a minimum.
Bower is a command line utility. Install it with npm.
{% highlight bash %} $ npm install -g bower {% endhighlight %}
Bower requires node, npm and git.
For troubleshooting installation on different platforms, read the troubleshooting wiki page.
Install packages with bower install. Bower installs packages to bower_components/.
{% highlight bash %} $ bower install {% endhighlight %}
A package can be a GitHub shorthand, a Git endpoint, a URL, and more. Read more about bower install.
{% highlight bash %}
$ bower install jquery
$ bower install desandro/masonry
$ bower install git://github.com/user/package.git
$ bower install http://example.com/script.js {% endhighlight %}
Search Bower packages and find the registered package names for your favorite projects.
Save your packages to bower.json with bower init.
How you use packages is up to you. We recommend you use Bower together with Grunt, RequireJS, Yeoman, and lots of other tools or build your own workflow with the API. You can also use the installed packages directly, like this, in the case of jquery:
{% highlight html %}
<script src="bower_components/jquery/dist/jquery.min.js"></script>{% endhighlight %}