joefiorini / bower

Bower integration for your ruby/rails apps.

Bower

Bower integration for your ruby apps.

Note: Bower's development is in a state of flux as they migrate to new conventions. Development of this library will stay in lock-step with the Bower spec, but no new releases will occur until the spec stabilizes and Sprockets support is complete as well.

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 .bowerrc file to your project's root directory that looks like this:

{
  "directory"  : "bower_components",
  "json"       : "bower.json",
  "endpoint"   : "https://bower.herokuapp.com",
  "searchpath" : []
}

Add your dependencies to bower.json then use bower (bower install, etc.) 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

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.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2013 Steve Agalloco. See LICENSE for details.