bower installs several files. why and how can I change it?
I am using bower to install dependencies for my project(I know there is yeoman but I am using bower). After setting up component.json file, when I do bower install it installs dependencies to correct directory but it install lots of other unnecessary files with it too. Now I want bower to install the specific file which is needed for example jquery.js, backbone.js and underscore.js and nothing else. How can I do it with bower?
I recently wrote up a possible solution to this problem and will highlight the main points below.
If you know you want a specific file from a particular package, it is easy enough to tell bower to only grab that file. For instance, with normalize.css, the only file that I care about is, well, normalize.css. So instead of typing:
bower install --save normalize-css
I can be more specific and tell bower to just download the css file:
bower install --save https://raw.github.com/necolas/normalize.css/master/normalize.css
That, of course, will always grab the latest version of normalize from the repository’s master branch when bower install is invoked for your project. If, however, I want to make sure I always get the 3.0.0 version of normalize, then I can dig through the releases/history to find the appropriate URL and viola:
bower install --save http://necolas.github.io/normalize.css/3.0.0/normalize.css
You can check out bower-installer.
bower list --path usually tells about the main js file in the package, which bower-installer conveniently picks up and exports only those files to your asset directories. You can then use this directory instead and ignore the bower_components dir.
It’s up to the package authors to specify what files to exclude from the package using the ignore property. For now just include the files you want in the your app/website and ignore the rest.
