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I'm on the fence on this one. On one hand, I'm fond of package managers. On the other, there's a TON of crap every time I run bower install... I've yet to figure out the best way of doing things. I'm thinking of using bower-installer, ship with a copy of the assets, and include bower.json, but not bower_components/. The other alternative is obviously CDNs, but then you're maintaining assets manually

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PHP already has a package manager though (Composer.)

Granted, the amount of friction involved depends on personal preference, and whatever environment you're working in, but why require a package manager in another language (and, potentially, the language itself) when one exists for the language you're actually deploying in?

I'm sympathetic to your point. Where I work, we use Grunt and npm for our PHP projects, and I'm in the process of replacing them (slowly but surely) with PHP-based versions of the tools we use, and replacing Gruntfiles with Makefiles. It's experimental, currently, but I feel like it's doable. The only dependency then is PHP and Composer, which I think is nice.

I include bower_components/ in .gitignore and use grunt-bowercopy[0] to move the files you actually want from bower_components/ to public/{js,css} or wherever. Files get committed once they're in public/ and I only re-run the grunt task when I want to upgrade a lib. I can understand people thinking this is overkill for a small project, but when you have dozens of libraries it's nice to have dependencies and their versions clearly defined.

[0]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/grunt-bowercopy

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