bower is deprecated as far as I know. And it’s problematic because we need to commit built files to the repository. What’s your use case? Install via npm should usually work

I believe Bower is still supported, though I agree that npm is being used more widely these days for frontend dependencies. The use case is that I'm building a workshop based on the Polymer Shop app. This app uses Bower to install dependencies. For now, I'm simply loading the Hoodie client from the Hoodie server. However, it would be nice to be able to treat the frontend app as its own independent app with its own dependencies.

I think bower can install directly via a URL, you can use this one: https://unpkg.com/@hoodie/[email protected]/dist/hoodie.js

It is the built version of @hoodie/client. Does that work?

This does not seem to work:

$ bower install --save https://unpkg.com/@hoodie/[email protected]/dist/hoodie.js
bower                     ENORESTARGET URL sources can't resolve targets

Nor any variation such as:

$ bower install --save https://unpkg.com/@hoodie/client
bower                     ENORESTARGET URL sources can't resolve targets

However, installing directly from GitHub seems to work:

$ bower install --save https://github.com/hoodiehq/hoodie-client.git
bower hoodie-client#*       not-cached https://github.com/hoodiehq/hoodie-client.git#*
bower hoodie-client#*          resolve https://github.com/hoodiehq/hoodie-client.git#*
bower hoodie-client#*         download https://github.com/hoodiehq/hoodie-client/archive/v10.0.2.tar.gz
bower hoodie-client#*          extract archive.tar.gz
bower hoodie-client#*         resolved https://github.com/hoodiehq/hoodie-client.git#10.0.2
bower hoodie-client#^10.0.2    install hoodie-client#10.0.2

This should be good enough as a work around. Thanks!

note that we don’t have the built version of @hoodie/client in the github repository which bower usually needs (and why we moved away from bower in the first place).

Telling from their own docs at https://bower.io/docs/api/#install, bower install https://unpkg.com/@hoodie/[email protected]/dist/hoodie.js should just work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I saw some talk of a potential bug with Bower that could explain why the install from unpkg didn't work, but I didn't spend a ton of time exploring that. Oh well. This should work for now. Hopefully Polymer moves away from using Bower in their application templates and demos.

For reference: Polymer/polymer#326 (comment)