How to Install Bower on Ubuntu

In this tutorial, we're going to be installing Bower onto Ubuntu. Bower is a package manager for front-end libraries, similar to that of Composer. It runs on Node.js and uses Git to install the required packages.

As it requires Git to install the packages we first need to make sure git is installed.

$ sudo apt-get install git-core

Bower uses Node.js and npm to manage the programs so let's install these.

$ sudo apt-get install nodejs

Node will now be installed with the executable located in /etc/usr/nodejs.

You should be able to execute Node.js by using the command below, but as ours are located in nodejs we will get the error: No such file or directory.

$ /usr/bin/env node

We can manually fix this by creating a symlink.

$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node

Now, check Node.js is installed correctly by using.

$ /usr/bin/env node
>

Install npm

$ sudo apt-get install npm

Install Bower

sudo npm install -g bower

Check Bower is installed and what version you're running.

$ bower -v
1.7.9