Bower is a popular repository of client-side JavaScript libraries. In your smart.json you can specify a dictionary of bower packages:

{
  "packages": {
    "bower": {}
  },
  "bower": {
    "select2": "3.4.5",
    "backbone": "1.1.0"
  }
}

You now have select2 and backbone libraries in your client application!

To ensure that other people running your app will always get the exact same dependencies you must always provide a version number.

If the package you want to use isn't published on bower.io, you can specify a source with the following syntax:

{
  "packages": {
    "bower": {}
  },
  "bower": {
    "chui": {
      "source": "sourcebits-robertbiggs/bower-chui",
      "version": "3.5.2"
    }
  }
}

Where source can be either:

• A name that maps to a package registered with Bower (default), e.g, jquery.
• A public remote Git or Subversion endpoint, e.g., git://github.com/someone/some-package.git.
• A private Git or Subversion repository using ssh to authenticate with the user's ssh public/private keys, e.g., [email protected]:someone/some-package.git.
• A shorthand endpoint, e.g., someone/some-package (defaults to GitHub).
• A local endpoint, i.e., a folder that's a Git or Subversion repository.
• A URL to a file, including zip and tar files.

If the package that you want to use doesn't have a main field in its bower.json or you want to include additional files, you may specify those using additionalFiles:

{
  "packages": {
    "bower": {}
  },
  "bower": {
    "elastic.js": {
      "version": "~1.1.1",
      "additionalFiles": [
        "dist/elastic-jquery-client.js"
      ]
    }
  }
}

If you don't want to use the smart.json file for that purpose, you can use a dedicated file named bower.json.

Bower for Meteor automatically adds the appropriate HTML tags to include your Bower packages. In our example above we 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!

Compare this to Bower out of the box, where you need to either manually reference the included files or use something like grunt-bower-install to reference them.

Contributions are very welcome, whether it is for a bug report, a fix or a new functionality proposition.

If you would like to buy me a beer, I proudly accept bitcoin tips: 1BowerXo5THZftsQa11G7EXv5cWX7A8ZZ7

This code is published under the MIT license.