Manage packages by using NuGet, NPM and Bower

NuGet

NuGet is a dotnet package management system for Visual Studio.

It makes it easy to add, update and remove external libraries in our application. Using NuGet, we can create our own packages easily and make it available for others.

Install package with Nuget

To install a new package, use the following command:

Install-Package (PackageName)

Update package with Nuget

To update existing package use this:

Update-Package (PackageName)

If you want to update a certain package, then use -version switch like below:

Update-Package Elmah -version 1.1

NPM

The Node Package Manager (npm) is a command-line tool used by developers to share and control modules (or packages) of JavaScript code written for use with Node.js.

When starting a new project, npm generates a package.json file. This file lists the package dependencies for your project. Since npm packages are regularly updated, the package.jsonfile allows you to set specific version numbers for each dependency. This ensures that updates to a package don't break your project.

Npm can save packages in two ways:

1. Globally in a root nodemodules folder, accessible by all projects.

2. Locally within a project's own node_modules folder, accessible only to that project.

Bower

Bower offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack

It can manage components that contain HTML, CSS, JavaScript, fonts or even image files.

Bower doesn’t concatenate or minify code or do anything else - it just installs the right versions of the packages you need and their dependencies.

Bower requires node, npm and git. It keeps track of these packages in a manifest file, bower.json.

Install Bower with npm

Bower is a command line utility. Install it with npm:

$ npm install -g bower

Install packages with bower

Bower installs packages to bower_components:

$ bower install (package)

Save package with bower

Create a bower.json file for your package with bower init command. Then save new dependencies with bower install PACKAGE --save.

<script src="bower_components/jquery/dist/jquery.min.js"></script>