Bower.io is a popular repository of client-side JavaScript libraries.
To use it in your meteor application, create a bower.json file:
{
"name": "my-app",
"version": "0.0.1",
"dependencies": {
"select2": "3.4.5",
"backbone": "1.1.0"
},
"private": true
}If you want to use a bower library at script load time (outside of a
Meteor.startup block, template handler, event, etc), you have to place the
bower.json file so that it loads first (see [Meteor load
order](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10693113/how-do-i-change-the-order-in-
which-meteor-loads-javascript-files)). Take the deepest directory you have
inside [project root]/lib/, add a bower directory, and put bower.json
there. So for example, if you currently have no directories in lib/, then you
can do lib/bower/bower.json, but if your current structure is lib/foo/bar/,
then you should do lib/foo/bar/bower/bower.json.
The next time you run meteor, the select2 and backbone libraries will be
downloaded, and the appropriate HTML tags to include those libraries will
automatically be added to your app. So you can just start using select2
widgets, and styles will be set correctly. (If you're curious just look at the
HTML source of a rendered page!) We use the main section of the library's
bower.json file to determine which files should be loaded.
If the package
you're adding doesn't use the main section: you can choose which files you
want by adding an override field to your bower.json as described in
#54.
Compare this to just using the bower command, where you need to either manually
reference the included files or use something like
grunt-bower-install
to reference them.
If you want to use the bower install <package> --save command, you can add
this .bowerrc file in the project root directory:
{
"directory": ".meteor/local/bower"
}If you need to reference the raw files (eg Polymer components in html files),
you can set a different directory, eg "public/bower", and include those files
manually in your <head>.
Make modernizr only available on the client by setting the arch in your bower.json:
"overrides": {
"modernizr": {
"arch": [ "client" ]
}
}
Other values include [ "server" ] and [ "client", "server" ].
You can ask meteor-bower to ignore a list of dependencies. For instance if you
have the Meteor package reactjs:react and the bower package react-bootstrap,
and you don't want meteor-bower to include a duplicate copy of react, add an
ignoredDependencies array to your bower.json:
{
"name": "my-app",
"version": "0.0.1",
"dependencies": {
"select2": "3.4.5",
"react-bootstrap": "~0.16.1"
},
"ignoredDependencies": [
"react"
]
}You can also have multiple
bower.json files, each paired with a .bowerrc, for instance:
bower.json:
{
"dependencies": {
"select2": "3.4.5"
}
...
}
.bowerrc
{
"directory": ".meteor/local/bower"
}
lib/bower.json:
{
"dependencies": {
"polymer": "~0.5.1"
}
...
}
lib/.bowerrc:
{
"directory": "../public/bower"
}Contributions are very welcome, whether it is a bug report or a PR with a fix or enhancement.
This code is published under the MIT license.