BOWER - help required

[jensen]

Been discovering a few tutorial website that kept referring to bower and how you can create websites and install stuff. And they also called bower "a package manager for the web" Source: http://bower.io/

But I still don't know what it is!

How to install it on the shared hosting?
Is it a feature that helps one to code better?
Is a server required before one can use bower?
Is it really better?

Anyone here using bower?

 

[essellar]

Since it requires node.js (server-side JavaScript) and git, you can't use it on Free Hosting or Premium; you'd need a VPS.

Essentially, it's the same thing as a Linux/Unix or Mac OS X package manager, except for your web server. Instead of using a search engine to find the components (programs, plugins, scripts, etc.) that you need for your web site, you just run the same kind of command that you would have run on your *nix desktop box (something like yum or apt-get) and Bower saves you upwards of 27 seconds worth of Googling, downloading to your local machine, and uploading to your web server (that's essentially what it does, except that it skips the local part).

It might make some sort of basic sense if you frequently deploy sites or spin up/wind down instances on a cloud service (like AWS); you can maintain a "master image" that has node.js and git, then run a Bower script to download (to your server) and install everything else you need for the site (including scripts/CSS/images you create and maintain on github). I don't see any advantage compared to Puppet or Chef (mature deployment tools), except that you get to type familiar Linux-type command-line stuff, which some neckbeard types like more than chocolate and bacon.

 

[jensen]

That's so much clearer than what google was trying to explain to me via the blind searches. Thank you essellar.

So I can skip that bower tutorials and continue on html5 and css3 and javascript and maybe onto Ruby.

Not ready for VPS yet.