Face two difficulties with bower package manager in vs2017
In Visual Studio 2017, can not find any .bowerrc file under bower.json
As an alternative to the suggestions of manually creating the bower.json file which will start out empty:
In Visual Studio right-click the Web Application project and choose Open Command line > Default (CMD), Developer Command Prompt or PowerShell.
If you don't have bower installed run the command npm install -g bower in the command prompt (requires npm).
Run the command bower init and follow the instructions which will create the bower.json file.
If you answer yes to set currently installed components as dependencies ? and you already have packages installed in the bower_components folder it will automatically add them as dependencies in the bower.json file.