Bower

Bower is a command-line package manager for the web, designed to manage frontend dependencies. It was created by Twitter in 2012. It fetches components from a registry or directly from source repositories and installs them into a project, by default into a bower_components directory. A manifest file, bower.json, describes dependencies, their versions, and metadata.

Usage typically involves a workflow with bower init to create a manifest, and bower install to install dependencies, which can be saved to bower.json with --save. It supports semantic versioning ranges, Git URLs, and registries. It also uses a .bowerrc file for configuration such as install directory and registry.

Decline and deprecation: Bower gained early popularity for front-end dependencies but declined as npm became the dominant package manager and modern tooling emerged. The project maintainers shifted to maintenance mode and recommended migrating to npm or Yarn. By 2020, Bower was effectively deprecated and no longer actively developed; many packages moved to npm.

Current guidance: For new projects, use npm or Yarn to manage frontend dependencies and rely on a bundler or build tool to assemble assets. For legacy projects, migrate to npm-based workflows by locating equivalent packages and updating configuration, ensuring compatibility with current tooling and deployment processes.