Bowerinstaller

rake task to install bower packages to rails. This project is inspired by bower, bower-installer, and bower-rails. The rake task uses bower to manage the package dependencies and download the required bower packages.
Then it follows the mechanism similar to bower-installer to install js/css to the proper location. Once that is done, it will then generate a component.js and component.css file to require all the installed js/css file.
component.js/css can then be included by application.js/css.

Requirement

• node (on github)
• bower installed with npm

Install

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'bowerinstaller'

bower.rb

Instead of using bower.json, bowerinstaller uses a DSL approach, similar to Gemfile. bower.rb must be created in your Rails application's root directory. Here is an example:

group :vendor do  # install package under vendor folder
  package :jquery, "1.8" do # require jquery, version 1.8
    do_not_install  # tell bowerinstall only download jquery for dependency check, we use do_not_install to tell bower that we will include jquery ourselves
  end
  package :handlebars, "1.0.0-rc.3" do
    source 'handlebars.js' # we want to install handlebars.js only.
  end
  package :datatables, "1.9.4" # we do not explicitly say what source to install.  This will install the files as specified in package's package.json's main attribute
end

The other support group is :lib.

Available command

rake bower:install    # install bower packages
rake bower:unindstall # uninstall bower packages

Note

After you run bower:install, the required js/css will be installed under /vendor/assets/components folder. It will also generate /app/assets/javascripts/components.js and /app/assets/stylesheets/components.js. You can explicitly require these two files in your application.js and application.css. This will ensure any vendor packages you add in the future will be automatically included into your app.