Visual Studio 2015 (ASP.NET 5): show 'Manage Bower Packages…' context menu

Question

In Visual Studio 2015, when I create a brand new solution with a brand new ASP.NET 5 project, I see the Manage Bower Packages... context menu when I right-click

Answer 1

I'm using Visual Studio 2017 Community version 15.7.0. I'm working on a .NET Core 2 project. I don't see the Bower Configuration file item at all in the Add New Item wizard suggested by @Samuli in his answer. Look at the the screenshot below:

Solution 1 - I went into the root directory of the project from windows explorer and created an empty bower.json file myself. After doing this, I came back to Visual Studio and right clicked the project file in solution explorer and I was all set. Manage Bower Packages... option was available now in the context menu.

Solution 2 - If you want to a non-empty bower configuration file with default configuration then follow these steps :

1. Open the command/shell prompt or power shell prompt
2. Change the current working directory in the shell prompt to project's root directory
3. Run the command bower init on shell prompt
4. You would get bower.json created by answering few general answers on the shell prompt.

Answer 2

Adding a Bower configuration file to the project solves this problem. This can be done by right-clicking the project, selecting "Add new item" from the menu and then "Bower configuration file" from the item templates. Visual Studio restart may be required to get the menu item to show up.

Answer 3

I additionally needed to:

Open the bower.json file in Visual Studio

And then the Manage Bower Packages... option appeared in the right-click menu.