Bower on windows

Package Manager for The Web

I'm building a framework that one of its requirements is to support web packages dynamically. One of my friends told me about bower. I instantly adopted bower as part of my CI .

As you all don't know my daily based development environment is running on Ubuntu. With that I have less worries, until I need to go and validate my code on Windows OS...

And then I got hit...

I got a few strange errors while running my code. I start looking into it and I found out that the statement require('bower') resulting a reference error. I checked my bower installation and it looked like everything is by the book.
Finally, while googling I saw a comment that someone suggested: "for windows, try install bower locally too". Hmmm.. I did that and it works for me, for now. Might be an issue...

Still Looking for a workaround...

After installing bower globally and locally (A reminder: on windows) I still didn't get it to work and fetch my packages. Now I got error code 127. Ok that error came from the 'spawn' command probably.

First thing I checked if I can run bower from the cmd and indeed it works like a charm. So it probably related to the nodejs environment that spawn a command line to bower, for example:

bower.commands
.install(['chai'], { save: true }, {})
.on('end', function (installed) {
    console.log(installed);
});

I looked into the code error:127 and this code is about running git command. Well some will say it's about code:128
I looked for an answer and I got many that some said it helped them. In my case nothing helped and I can say that for my users I cannot give this solutions since it might not be helpful for them either.
Here are some of the solutions:

• Bower Errors on Windows
• Bower install error, "status code of git: 127"
• Unable work bower on windows

The Summary of those are, clean bower cache, put git.exe into path or use other configuration for git.

My, worked for me...

My solution to this issue is.... I just created a simple batch file that gets the bower information as arguments. Nodejs then detect that the running OS is windows and using a standard spawn command, calling to my batch file that is running externally to the nodejs.

I just hope that someone will come up with a better solution ...

npm install ++

I have this npm project that I'm working on for some time now. I got to a point that I want to give my users a smooth nodejs package installation process. It means that any additional global dependencies that the user will be asked to install in additional will be part of the "npm install" process.

I start thinking of how can I accomplish that? I searched the web and bumped into some possibilities such as adding a script section to the package.json file.
Sounds like a great idea, so I gave it a try.

How can I add a script to a package.json file?

For adding a script to the package.json file, all you have to do is add a script section. Read about it in here

...
 "scripts": {
    "install": "npm install -g bower"
  }
...

I executed the above script as part of my package.json file, on my Ubuntu environment, but I got an error: permission denied. Oh well I need to add 'sudo' to the command, but how can I get the password prompt?! Another question was, how can I add cross platform script? I cannot change the command dynamically.

Use nodejs script for get the job done

I thought about how can I solve this one. I had some ideas but the one i used was to execute nested nodejs module for getting cross platform installation.

...
 "scripts": {
    "install": "node installer.js"
  }
...

Spawning with sudo

I created an installer.js script and my first task was to spawn a process with a sudo command. For that I used the sudo package that is pretty much using the spawn but with sudo prompt and it's working just great.

Wrap up

All I have left to do is detecting on which OS I'm running and with that spawn with sudo or w/o and i get to run 'npm install' that gets the dependencies as part of its process.

NPM Module: package-script

I created a module just for that, you can use it...

npm install package-script