Should bower_components be gitignored?

Question

Would it be good practice to keep only the bower.json file and gitignore the whole bower_components directory?

Answer 1

It is good to ignore /bower_components dir and check in only bower.json and bower-locker.bower.json file if you create lock file using bower-locker written by Shawn Lonas.

Before bower-locker created, there was disadvantage caused by an issue of bower not having shrinkwrap capability but it can be mitigated by the above library.

Run following commands to achieve it:

npm install bower-locker -g

or

yarn global add bower-locker

then generate lock file based on existing bower.json file by runing:

bower-locker lock

The original bower.json file will be re-named to bower-locker.bower.json