Bower

Bower integration for your ruby apps.

Usage with Sprockets

Rails

Add bower to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'bower'

Rails 4 ships with an updated version of Sprockets that supports bower's bower.json file. If you are running, Rails 3, then you need to require Sprockets 2.2.2.backport1:

gem 'sprockets', '2.2.2.backport1'

The gem includes a generator that sets up your project:

rails generate bower:install

This will install a configuration file (.bowerrc) in your project's root. The configuration file tells bower where to install components and where it expects bower.json.

{
  "directory"  : "bower_components"
}

You can change the destination directory if you like, though putting Bower components under app/assets/ can cause problems (see rails/rails#7968). Add your dependencies to bower.json or use bower install as you would in any other project.

Non-Rails Projects

While offering less capability than when used in Rails' asset pipeline, you can still use the bower gem in a non-Rails project. Just require the gem and append the corresponding directory to Sprocket's load path:

require 'sprockets'
require 'bower'

environment = Sprockets::Environment.new
environment.append_path Bower.environment.directory

Additional Tutorials

Using Rails+Bower on Heroku

How this gem differs from other techniques

For Rails apps, integrating bower components into lib/assets and/or vendor/assets seems like the wrong approach. Since bower can support multiple searchpaths, the need to make a distinction between external dependencies and frameworks does not exist. It can all be managed in once place. This gem takes a more opinionated approach and installs components to bower_components/ in your project's root by default. You can always change it to another location.

If this approach isn't to your liking, you may want to take a look at bower-rails.

TODO

When used with Sprockets, you still need to use a require directive in order to require a component's files. This seems like something that should just work.

Contributing

Pull requests welcome: fork, make a topic branch, commit (squash when possible) with tests and I'll happily consider merging your contributions.