bower-rails
Bower support for Rails projects. Dependency file is bower.json in Rails root dir or Bowerfile if you use DSL. Check out changelog for the latest changes and releases.
Requirements
Install
in Gemfile
Ruby
gem "bower-rails", "~> 0.7.0"
JSON configuration
Bower-rails now supports the standard bower package format out-of-the-box. Simply place your bower.json file the Rails root directory to start. Using the standard format will default all bower components to be installed under the vendor directory.
To install dependencies into both lib and vendor directories, run the initializer to generate a custom bower.json:
Bash
rails g bower_rails:initialize
This will generate a special bower.json that combines two standard bower packages into one. Simply specify your dependencies under each folder name to install them into the corresponding directories.
example bower.json file
javascript
{
"lib": {
"name": "bower-rails generated lib assets",
"dependencies": {
"threex" : "[email protected]:rharriso/threex.git",
"gsvpano.js" : "https://github.com/rharriso/GSVPano.js/blob/master/src/GSVPano.js"
}
},
"vendor": {
"name": "bower-rails generated vendor assets",
"dependencies": {
"three.js" : "https://raw.github.com/mrdoob/three.js/master/build/three.js"
}
}
}
Ruby DSL configuration
The Ruby DSL configuration is a Bowerfile at the project’s root with DSL syntax similar to Bundler.
Example Bowerfile
By default assets are put to ./vendor/assets/bower_components directory:
``` ruby
Puts to ./vendor/assets/bower_components
asset “backbone” asset “moment” ```
But the default value can be overridden by assets_path method:
``` ruby assets_path “assets/my_javascripts”
Puts to ./vendor/assets/my_javascripts/bower_components
asset “backbone” asset “moment” ```
And finally, the assets_path method can be overridden by an option in a group call:
``` ruby assets_path “assets/javascript”
Puts files under ./vendor/assets/js/bower_components
group :vendor, :assets_path => “assets/js” do asset “jquery” # Assummes it’s latests asset “backbone”, “1.2” end
Puts files under ./lib/assets/javascript/bower_components
group :lib do
asset “jquery”
asset “backbone”, “1.2”
end
```
NOTE: Available groups are :lib and :vendor. Others are not allowed according to the Rails convention.
NOTE: All the assets should be stored in /assets subdirectory so putting it under ./vendor/js directory is unavailable
Rake tasks
Once you are done with bower.json or Bowerfile you can run
rake bower:installto install js componentsrake bower:install:forceto install with force optionrake bower:updateto update js componentsrake bower:update:pruneto update components and uninstall extraneous packagesrake bower:listto list all packagesrake bower:resolveto resolve relative asset paths in components
Bower Configuration
If you provide a .bowerrc in the rails project root, bower-rails will use it for bower configuration.
Some .bowerrc options are not supported: directory, cwd, and interactive. Bower-rails
will ignore the directory property and instead will use the automatically generated asset path.
Bower Installation
Bower should be installed using npm. Bower can be installed globally (with $ npm install -g bower) or in node_modules in the root directory of your project.
Relative asset paths
Some bower components (eg. Bootstrap) have relative urls in the CSS files for imports, images, etc. Rails prefers using helper methods for linking to assets within CSS. Relative paths can cause issues when assets are precompiled for production.
If you would like the bower assets to be reinstalled with the relative paths on every deploy, provide an option for bower-rails so it do it automatically before the rake assets:precompile task is run:
ruby
BowerRails.configure do |bower_rails|
# By default this option is false
bower_rails.resolve_before_precompile = true
end
Remember that you should have bower installed either locally in your project or on a remote server.