18 May 2014

Bower is a simple package manager for front-end assets like CSS and Javascript. It provides an elegant solution for including third-party assets and libraries (e.g. Bootstrap, jQuery) into different projects on your machine. Here’s how it works:

Get Bower

$ npm install -g bower

Install a Package

Bower installs packages on a project-by-project basis. Make sure you’re inside of the project directory where you want a package installed first, then run:

$ bower install <package>

This command creates a directory inside your project called bower-components/ containing the package you’ve installed, as well as any dependencies.

Use a Package

To use a Bower package, simply reference the appropriate files in bower-components/ manually.

<script src="/bower_components/jquery/jquery.js"></script>

List Packages

$ bower list

Use this command to list all packages installed on a given project. Again, the list of installed packages will vary on a project-by-project basis.