What is Bower?
Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.
Bower is a tool in the Package Managers category of a tech stack.
Bower is an open source tool with 15K GitHub stars and 1.8K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Bower's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Bower?
Companies
1111 companies reportedly use Bower in their tech stacks, including Twitter, Accenture, and Platform.
Developers
5176 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Bower.
Bower Integrations
WebStorm, Yeoman, Bitrise, CodeKit, and WhiteSource are some of the popular tools that integrate with Bower. Here's a list of all 8 tools that integrate with Bower.
Pros of Bower
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Bower's Features
- Bower operates at a lower level than previous attempts at client-side package management – such as Jam, Volo, or Ender. These managers could consume Bower as a dependency.
- Bower's aim is simply to install packages, resolve dependencies from a bower.json, check versions, and then provide an API which reports on these things. Nothing more. This is a major diversion from past attempts at browser package management.
- Bower offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of package management, while exposing an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack.
Bower Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Bower?
npm
npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.
Yarn
Yarn caches every package it downloads so it never needs to again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are faster than ever.
Webpack
A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.
gulp
Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes.
NuGet
A free and open-source package manager designed for the Microsoft development platform. It is also distributed as a Visual Studio extension.
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