What Happened to Bower?

Bower is a popular package management system for managing static content used by client-side web applications. Visual Studio provides rich support for Bower, including templates and package management tools.

In October 2017, there were announcements on Twitter hinting that the Bower platform was being deprecated. While Bower hasn’t gone away, the official website is encouraging people to use different frameworks, even going so far as to provide detailed instructions on “How to migrate away from Bower” and “How to drop Bower support”.

In their own words:

Though it doesn’t say it explicitly, it implies that Bower is deprecated. Existing projects that depend on package management via Bower will continue to work for the time being; but it’s recommended that new projects should not take a dependency on Bower.

Introducing Library Manager

While there are other useful package managers, as Bower points out (e.g. npm), most are designed to handle a variety of tasks, which adds unnecessary complexity when you only need them for a single task (acquiring client-side libraries). So, here at Visual Studio, we decided to create a new tool that would be as simple as possible for specifically addressing the need to acquire client-side content for web applications. Hence, the introduction of “Library Manager”.

Library Manager (“LibMan” for short) is Visual Studio’s new client-side static content management system. Designed as a replacement for Bower and npm, LibMan helps users find and fetch library files from an external source (like CDNJS) or from any file system library catalog.

You can specify the library files required for your project by adding entries to the LibMan configuration file – libman.json. See the image below; it shows an example libman.json file in which some jQuery files are added to the wwwroot/lib directory.