Bower Buildpack

This buildpack will handle installing Bower dependencies for your app.

How to use it?

Unless you're deploying a very boring application that has no backend stack (Node.js / Play / Rails / Django / whatever), you're going to want to use this buildpack along with your primary buildpack. You do that by using heroku-buildpack-multi.

Assuming your application is Node.js, using this buildpack along with the Node.js buildpack is as simple as checking in a .buildpacks file into your repository...

$ cat .buildpacks

https://bitbucket.org/sday_atlassian/heroku-buildpack-bower.git#master
https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs.git#master

... and then updating your Heroku app to use the heroku-buildpack-multi buildpack.

$ heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi.git

How does it do it?

This buildpack will vendor a private copy of Node.js to run Bower. The Node.js install is fetched from Heroku's CDN, so it takes approx ~1 second to download the tarball and extract it. It caches the install of Bower into your slug to speed up the install process. It also configures Bower to use your slugs cache for the packages + registry metadata, so subsequent re-deploys are very quick. Finally, it (temporarily) uses a forked verison of Bower that ensures Bower doesn't croak due to crazy ENOENT / ENOTEMPTY issues during deploy.

Why use it?

Without this buildpack you have two options:

• Check your bower_components/ directory in to the repo.
• Use the Node.js buildpack, add a package.json that depends on bower, and a postinstall step that runs bower.

TODO

• Bower install is cached a little too aggressively - right now it'll never be updated after the initial install. The buildpack should put the date in a .bower-install file in the cache, and update Bower if that date is older than, say, a week.