Bower – a package manager for the web

Web sites are made of lots of things — frameworks, libraries, assets, and utilities. Bower manages all these things for you. Keeping track of all these packages and making sure they are up to date (or set to the specific versions you need) is tricky. Bower to the rescue! Bower can manage components that contain HTML, CSS, JavaScript, fonts or even image files. Bower doesn’t concatenate or minify code or do anything else – it just installs the right versions of the packages you need and their dependencies.

To get started, Bower works by fetching and installing packages from all over, taking care of hunting, finding, downloading, and saving the stuff you’re looking for. Bower keeps track of these packages in a manifest file, bower.json. How you use packages is up to you. Bower provides hooks to facilitate using packages in your tools and workflows.

Bower is optimized for the front-end. If multiple packages depend on a package – jQuery for example – Bower will download jQuery just once. This is known as a flat dependency graph and it helps reduce page load.

Install Bower

Bower is a command line utility. Install it with npm.

$ npm install -g bower

Bower requires node, npm and git.

Latest release: 

For troubleshooting installation on different platforms, read the troubleshooting wiki page.

Getting started

Install packages

Install packages with bower install. Bower installs packages to bower_components/.

$ bower install <package>

A package can be a GitHub shorthand, a Git endpoint, a URL, and more. Read more about bower install.

# installs the project dependencies listed in bower.json
$ bower install
# registered package
$ bower install jquery
# GitHub shorthand
$ bower install desandro/masonry
# Git endpoint
$ bower install git://github.com/user/package.git
# URL
$ bower install http://example.com/script.js

Search packages

Search Bower packages and find the registered package names for your favorite projects.

Save packages

Create a bower.json file for your package with bower init.

Then save new dependencies to your bower.json with bower install PACKAGE --save

Use packages

How you use packages is up to you. We recommend you use Bower together with Grunt, RequireJS, Yeoman, and lots of other tools or build your own workflow with the API. You can also use the installed packages directly, like this, in the case of jquery:

<script src="bower_components/jquery/dist/jquery.min.js"></script>