Why does Bower installation download the entire Bootstrap repo?

[rwillrich]

I have installed Bootstrap with Bower on an application I'm developing and the fact that Bower downloads the entire repository have surprised me, given that all production files are in 'dist' directory.

Initially I've thought that it was caused by Bower, or by the lack of some configuration of him. Then I research on Bower's documentation and notice that exists a 'ignore' property on bower.json that serves for this purpose.

Shouldn't we add the files other than the production ones to this property? Or am I missing some motivation beyond maintaining all files on Bower's Bootstrap package?

[cvrebert]

I'm not terribly familiar with Bower, but, if you want to do any customization of Bootstrap, you need the .less files too, not just the precompiled .css. So only grabbing the /dist/ folder isn't enough in that case.

/cc @fat as Bower guru.

[thomaswelton]

I can't really answer why it works this way. But all I can say is that it has always worked this way.
I suppose it makes it easier, as bower just has to concern it's self with downloading the latest commit or tag from what ever git remote you've specified.

If you use grunt there are many plugins you can use which will download your bower dependencies and either copy the "main" files into you public dir, or clean up the files you don't need from the repo for you automatically.

But either way I suppose this question would be best asked in the bower fourms or repo, as this isn't specific to botstrap.

[cvrebert]

Closing per @thomaswelton

[boulox]

that not 100% true, you can definitely define some parameter in the bower.json. Bower won't download anything that it's in the ignore list Such as :

{
   ........
    "ignore": [
        ".*",
        "CHANGELOG.md",
        "component.json",
        "package.json",
        "_includes"
        "_layouts"
    ]
}

I 2nd the issue when installing with bower i don't want the doc files

[rwillrich]

+1 But that is my question is: should we make this? At least with some documentation and files that don't are important in the build process.

[cvrebert]

I'll leave this for @fat to sort out.

[rwillrich]

I've submitted in my fork and made a pull request for it: #10353