Bower is a package manager for the web

I have yet to use this, considering I just found out about this project this evening. I had actually stumbled onto this project after stumbling onto Nicolas Gallagher’s little collection of utility CSS classes called SUIT.

When looking at SUIT, I noticed something different in its installation instructions bower install suit-utils which I found a bit odd cause SUIT is just a CSS library, not a Ruby Gem or something dynamic … so why the CLI install instruction?

Similar to Ruby’s Gemfile or Node’s package.json

Bower is a package manager for the web. But what does that mean? Similar to Ruby’s Gemfile or Node’s package.json, with Bower you can create a component.json file in your project’s root, specifying all of its dependencies.

Right now, when you are managing dependencies in your projects, such as JavaScript libraries, it’s all manual. Bower aims to change that.

Basically, Bower is a generic tool which resolves dependencies and locks down packages to a version. It runs over Git, and is package-agnostic. A package may contain JavaScript, CSS, images, or whatever and it doesn’t rely on any particular transport and lets you easily install those assets and manages dependencies for you.

Usage

Bower can install packages by name, Git endpoint, URL or local path. Here are a few examples:

bower install jquery
bower install git://github.com/maccman/package-jquery.git
bower install http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.2.js
bower install ./repos/jquery

For more details checkout Bower’s homepage or dive into the source code.