grunt-browserify-bower

Browserify bower libraries into a separate bundle. Can be used together with grunt-browserify to externalize libraries into a separate file and speed up bundling of your application.

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ~0.4.1

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-browserify-bower --save-dev

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

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-browserify-bower');

The "browserifyBower" task

Overview

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

grunt.initConfig({
  browserifyBower: {
    options: {
      // Task-specific options go here.
    },
    your_target: {
      // Target-specific file lists and/or options go here.
    },
  },
})

The task browserifies all installed bower packages and optionally uses browserify-shim to shim non CommonJS libraries. All these libraries are browserified into a separate 'libs' bundle for your web app. The task automatically sets grunt-browserify's options.external setting.

Why should you use this?

• Your main browserify task runs a lot faster when it doesn't have to repackage large library files like JQuery and AngularJS each time. This makes your development cycle a lot more responsive.
• Libraries are a lot easier to integrate in your project. For most libraries it's as simple as bower install foo and require(foo) in your application.

Options

options.file

Type: String Default value: './.tmp/scripts/lib.js'

Path of the destination file.

options.checkVersions

Type: Boolean Default value: true

Simple switch to enable/disable version checking of installed bower components. You might want to disable this to make whole process faster, especially with bigger number of components.

Note: If you are running on Windows and you don't have Git client available system wide, you should disable this, otherwise whole process might just fail.

options.forceResolve

Type: Object Default value: {}

This object allows to adjust the path to the main file of a bower package, in case the one specified in the package's bower.json is faulty. The path should be relative to the package directory.

Example:

forceResolve: {
  'wysihtml5': 'dist/wysihtml5-0.3.0.min.js'
}

options.shim

Type: Object Default value: {}

This object allows adjusting the options passed to browserify-shim.

You can add entries for every library installed via bower. For these, you should omit the path setting, as this is automatically determined via bower-resolve or the forceResolve option.

Note that the exports setting defaults to null and needs to be adjusted if you want to shim a non CommonJS library that exports to the window object.

You can also add entries for libraries not installed via bower. These are passed to browserify-shim directly and you need to specify a path in this case.

options.transform

Type: [String || Function] Default value: []

Specifies a pipeline of functions (or modules) through which the browserified bundle will be run. See the browserify docs themselves for more on how to use transforms.

Usage Examples

grunt.initConfig({
  browserifyBower: {
    options: {
      file: './tmp/lib.js',
      // fix broken bower `main` entries
      forceResolve: {
        'wysihtml5': 'dist/wysihtml5-0.3.0.min.js'
      },
      shim: {
        'wysihtml5': {
          exports: 'wysihtml5'
        }
      }
    }
  }
})

Usage with grunt-watch or grunt-este-watch

If you want to rebundle your application every time one of your .js files changes, but not rebuild your library bundle, you can run the task with the nowrite flag. This sets the browserify.exports setting according to your installed bower libs, but suppresses the rebundling of your library bundle.

Example (with grunt-watch):

grunt.initConfig({
  watch: {
      browserify: {
        files: 'app/scripts/**/*.js',
        tasks: ['browserifyBower:libs:nowrite', 'browserify:app']
      }
  }
})

Default Options

grunt.initConfig({
  browserifyBower: {
    options: {
      file: './.tmp/scripts/lib.js',
      forceResolve: {},
      shim: {},
      transform: []
    }
  },
})

Contributing

In lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint and test your code using Grunt.

Release History

See CHANGELOG.md