Overview

Bower

Stacks6.4K

Followers4.5K

Votes927

GitHub Stars14.9K

Forks1.8K

npm

Stacks126.4K

Followers82.2K

Votes1.6K

GitHub Stars17.6K

Forks3.0K

Bower vs npm: What are the differences?

Installation Process: The main difference between Bower and npm is their installation process. Bower installs dependencies in a flat directory structure, whereas npm installs dependencies within nested node_modules folders.
Purpose: Bower focuses on front-end packages, libraries, and frameworks, while npm is primarily used for managing Node.js backend dependencies.
Configuration: Bower requires a bower.json file for configuration, whereas npm uses package.json to manage dependencies, scripts, and metadata.
Dependency Resolution: Bower does not support semantic versioning and enforces a flat dependency tree, which can lead to version conflicts. On the other hand, npm supports semantic versioning and uses a nested dependency tree for better resolution.
Community Support: npm has a larger community and a vast repository of Node.js packages, making it more extensive and diverse compared to Bower.
Development Workflow: While Bower is more straightforward and minimalistic, npm offers a more robust and complex development workflow with features like scripts, package version management, and module system.

In Summary, Bower and npm differ significantly in their installation process, purpose, configuration, dependency resolution, community support, and development workflow.

Advice on Bower, npm

Julien

CTO at Jasp

May 15, 2022

Decided

Yarn v3 is a fantastic tool to organize monorepos. Thanks to its offline cache, our CI/CD steps are streamlined and faster.

Other tools like Turbo integrate easily with its monorepo features.

One regretful thing is that Yarn PnP is not widely supported, which does not allow us to fully use Zero-installs/PnP for even faster builds and a better developer experience.

11.1k views11.1k

Comments

StackShare

Apr 23, 2019

Needs adviceon

Node.js

npm

Yarn

From a StackShare Community member: “I’m a freelance web developer (I mostly use Node.js) and for future projects I’m debating between npm or Yarn as my default package manager. I’m a minimalist so I hate installing software if I don’t need to- in this case that would be Yarn. For those who made the switch from npm to Yarn, what benefits have you noticed? For those who stuck with npm, are you happy you with it?"

294k views294k

Comments

Sub

Developer

Jan 5, 2022

Review

I don't think there's a decision to be made, aren't they different products and services? GitHub is traditionally an online repository based around Git versioning. GitHub have expanded into other things since Microsoft came in though. Nevertheless I recommend seriously taking the time to work through the very steep learning curve of setting up a local development environment. You could start by using Visual Studio Code and get a free GitHub account to push your private projects onto. If anything it'll be a free offsite backup of your work. You'll need to install Git to take care of your local repository as well as NPM and also look at Yarn. Have this on your priority list, do some research, gather links, tutorials, downloads etc and take a week out to get it done when you feel you're at the stage where you'd like to be more organised. You could start by trying VSCode see whether you like the features and using it as an editor. Look at other editors and so on.

662 views662

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Bower	npm
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.	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.
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.	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 14.9K	GitHub Stars 17.6K
GitHub Forks 1.8K	GitHub Forks 3.0K
Stacks 6.4K	Stacks 126.4K
Followers 4.5K	Followers 82.2K
Votes 927	Votes 1.6K
Pros & Cons
Pros 483 Package management 214 Open source 142 Simple 53 Great for for project dependencies injection 27 Web components with Meteor Cons 2 Deprecated 1 Front end only	Pros 648 Best package management system for javascript 382 Open-source 327 Great community 148 More packages than rubygems, pypi, or packagist 112 Nice people matter Cons 5 Problems with lockfiles 5 Bad at package versioning and being deterministic 3 Node-gyp takes forever 1 Super slow

What are some alternatives to Bower, npm?

Meteor

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

Elm

Writing HTML apps is super easy with elm-lang/html. Not only does it render extremely fast, it also quietly guides you towards well-architected code.

RequireJS

RequireJS loads plain JavaScript files as well as more defined modules. It is optimized for in-browser use, including in a Web Worker, but it can be used in other JavaScript environments, like Rhino and Node. It implements the Asynchronous Module API. Using a modular script loader like RequireJS will improve the speed and quality of your code.

Browserify

Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

Julia

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library.

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.

Racket

It is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It is designed to be a platform for programming language design and implementation. It is also used for scripting, computer science education, and research.

Component

Component's philosophy is the UNIX philosophy of the web - to create a platform for small, reusable components that consist of JS, CSS, HTML, images, fonts, etc. With its well-defined specs, using Component means not worrying about most frontend problems such as package management, publishing components to a registry, or creating a custom build process for every single app.

PureScript

A small strongly typed programming language with expressive types that compiles to JavaScript, written in and inspired by Haskell.

Composer

It is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.