Flask-Bower

Flask-Bower provides a method to manage and serve bower installed packages. This simplifies javascript dependency management a lot.

To provide this, there is a flask blueprint to serve content from your bower_components directory and use url_for() for serving the files same as serving files form flask static folder.

Usage

Flask-Bower is available on PyPi: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Flask-Bower/

So just add it to your requirements.txt or install using pip install flask-bower

First you have to add it to your app

from flask_bower import Bower

[...]

Bower(app)

This provides the /bower url route.

Per default, the bower_components directory has to be inside the app directory (app/bower_components - like your static and templates directories). Another directory can be specified using BOWER_COMPONENTS_ROOT

Install your packages like jquery with bower: bower install -S jquery

Now it should look like:

$ ls -1 app/bower_components/jquery
MIT-LICENSE.txt
bower.json
dist
src

To include and use this, you can use url_for():

<script src="{{ url_for('bower.static', filename='jquery/dist/jquery.js') }}"></script>

Configuration

There are several configuration options to customize the behavior:

BOWER_COMPONENTS_ROOT

default: bower_components

Directory name containing your installed bower packages

BOWER_KEEP_DEPRECATED

default: True

Keep deprecated functions available

Note: deprecated functions will be removed in future versions

affected functions:

• bower_url_for - please migrate to url_for('bower.static', filename='component/path')

BOWER_QUERYSTRING_REVVING

default: True

Append ?version= parameter to url (useful for cache busting by updates). It tries to detect the version in the following order:

1. bower.json
2. package.json (if available)
3. file modification timestamp

BOWER_REPLACE_URL_FOR

default: False

Replace flasks url_for() function in templates.

This is useful - but not recommended - to build an "overlay" for the static folder.

Warning: Replacing url_for() causes conflicts with other flask extensions like flask-cdn, since only one extension can replace url_for() at a time and the last registered extension wins.

BOWER_SUBDOMAIN

default: None

Subdomain to serve the content like static (see flask blueprint documentation for subdomains)

BOWER_TRY_MINIFIED

default: True

Check if a minified version is available and serve this instead (check if a file with <filename>.min.<ext> like jquery/dist/jquery.min.js exists)

BOWER_URL_PREFIX

default: /bower

Customize the url prefix

Deprecations

bower_url_for(component, file)

This is now deprecated since it is a break of the development workflow due to the use of a different function than url_for(), which is the default for url handling in flask.

Since v1.1.0 it is possible to use the default url_for() function also for flask assets::

url_for('bower.static', filename='component/path')

Use of this new approach is recommended to all developers and to simplify the migration the bower_url_for() function will stay available for a while; though it can be disabled to help migrating (see BOWER_KEEP_DEPRECATED)