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Can someone give me some real-world, concrete feedback on using bower instead of browserify on top of NPM? I am looking at using Grunt to manage the build.

I really like the way bower works, but I am looking at incorporating grunt into the build process (to do things like auto-wire dependencies via bower), but then I am digging into NPM anyway.

How much complexity does browserify add, vs. bower? What other ramifications does browserify imply down the line? How does using grunt + NPM + browserify pan out vs. grunt + bower?

I see this SO question: Javascript dependency management : npm vs bower vs volo?, but I am really looking for usage feedback especially with respect to grunt builds.

Community
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mtyson
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1 Answers1

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I don't have a lot of experience with Grunt (I primarily use Gulp, but I'll assume the results are similar).

When it comes to package managers, NPM and Bower both work and give you easy access to installing and updating modules.

I suggest using NPM and Browserify. Browserify allows you to easily manage dependencies and load order in your application by using the Node style require/exports patterns. I can't really compare this to Bower since (unless I'm mistaken) Bower doesn't include any tools for loading the dependencies into your application. Without another tool, you will have to manually curate your dependency list to make sure everything loads in the correct order.

I personally use NPM, Browserify, and Bower (for purely front-end modules that aren't available through NPM).

I hope this helps.

SimpleJ
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