grunt-bower-link-snapshot

Grunt Task: tag linked bower components into bower.json for build servers

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ~0.4.5

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-bower-link-snapshot --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-bower-link-snapshot');

The "bower_link_snapshot" task

Project Setup

When developing bower components for use across multiple projects, it is common to use 'bower link' to symlink a dev copy. http://bower.io/docs/api/#link

The problem comes when uploading your package to a build server, your working copy is ahead of the copy which will be used to build the project.

This solution

Ensure the latest changes to the bower component are committed (if not, throws)
Ensure the latest commit has a tag (if not, bumps a minor version)
Update the project's bower.json to reflect the concrete tagged versions.

It does not

commit or push changes
'bower unlink' the component - you keep the symlinked version for dev

Issues

Should check if the bower components are linked or installed - noop on installed
Should accept CLI parameters for the version bump
Uses the CLI tools for grunt and bower.
Manually re-writes the bower.json file, should use the bower js code.
No tests, no build step, CS and JS committed together

Ideas for configurable extensions

git push --tags after bumping

This really only works on your dev machine, don't include it in a tool-chain on a build server.

Overview

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named bower_link_snapshot to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
  bower_link_snapshot: {
    options: {
      packages: ["package_a", "package_b"] 
    },
    your_target: {
      // Target-specific file lists and/or options go here.
    },
  },
});