Bower Repositories

To enable calculation of Bower package metadata, in the Administration module, go to Repositories| Repositories | Local and click on New Local Repository. Select Bower from the Select Package Type dialog to create your local Bower repository.

Integration Benefits

JFrog Artifactory and Bower Registries

The public bower registry does not contain any actual binary packages; it is a simple key-value store pointing from a package name to its equivalent Git repository.

Since most of the packages are hosted in GitHub, you will want to create a Remote Repositories which serves as a caching proxy for github.com. If necessary, you can do the same for bitbucket.org or any other remote repository you want to access.

Artifacts (such as tar.gz files) requested from a remote repository are cached on demand. You can remove downloaded artifacts from the remote repository cache, however you can not manually deploy artifacts to a remote repository.

To define a remote repository to proxy github.com as well as the public Bower registry follow the steps below:

A Virtual Repository defined in Artifactory aggregates packages from both local and remote repositories.

This allows you to access both locally hosted Bower packages and remote proxied Bower registries from a single URL defined for the virtual repository.

To create a virtual Bower repository set Bower to be its Package Type,and select the underlying local and remote Bower repositories to include under the Repositories section.

Advanced Configuration

The fields under External Dependency Rewrite are connected to automatically rewriting external dependencies for Bower packages that need them.

Field	Description
Enable Dependency Rewrite	When checked, automatically rewriting external dependencies is enabled.
Remote Repository For Cache	The remote repository aggregated by this virtual repository in which the external dependency will be cached.
Patterns Allow List	An Allow List of Ant-style path expressions that specify where external dependencies may be downloaded from. By default, this is set to ** which means that dependencies may be downloaded from any external source. For example, if you wish to limit external dependencies to only be downloaded from github.com, you should add **/github.com/** (and remove the default ** expression).

In order to use Bower with Artifactory you need 2 components (npm packages):

Once Bower is installed, add the Artifactory Bower resolver by editing your ~/.bowerrc configuration file

Adding a Pluggable Resolver

{
  "resolvers": [
    "bower-art-resolver"
  ]
}

Replace the default registry with a URL pointing to a Bower repository in Artifactory by editing your ~/.bowerrc configuration file (the example below uses a repository with the key bower-repo ):

Replacing the default registry

{
  "registry": "http://localhost:8081/artifactory/api/bower/bower-repo"
}

Once the Bower command line tool is configured, every bower install command will fetch packages from the bower repository specified above. For example:

$ bower install bootstrap
bower bootstrap#*           not-cached art://twbs/bootstrap#*
bower bootstrap#*           resolve art://twbs/bootstrap#*
bower bootstrap#*           extract archive.tar.gz
bower bootstrap#*           resolved art://twbs/bootstrap#e-tag:0b9cb774e1

When running bower install on a bower.json file that is hosted on your local machine, you need to define a custom template in .bowerrc file by adding the following line.

shorthand-resolver": "art://{{owner}}/{{package}}"

From version v4.11, for bower packages downloaded from remote repositories, Artifactory supports resolving dependencies that are specified using the Bower shorthand resolver for dependencies hosted on GitHub. Use of the shorthand resolver is reflected in the Bower install output, in the shorthand resolver dependencies, which are prefixed with $$$art-shorthand-resolver$$$. For example:

bower mypackagetest#$$$art-shorthand-resolver$$$-<username>-mypackagetest-master.tar.gz       not-cachedart://<username>/mypackagetest#$$$art-shorthand-resolver$$$-<username>-mypackagetest-master.tar.gz
bower mypackagetest#$$$art-shorthand-resolver$$$-<username>-mypackagetest-master.tar.gz       resolveart://<username>/mypackagetest#$$$art-shorthand-resolver$$$-<username>-mypackagetest-master.tar.gz
bower mypackagetest#$$$art-shorthand-resolver$$$-<username>-mypackagetest-master.tar.gz       resolvedart://<username>/mypackagetest#$$$art-shorthand-resolver$$$-<username>-mypackagetest-master.tar.gz