Hunting down a Bower dependency issue

When trying to add a new Bower dependency, we saw it didn't get added to the index.html.

Normally, when you run npm install, the wiredep plugin adds all bower dependencies to index.html:

After some searching, we noticed the following line in our new dependency's bower.json:

"main": "./dist/jquery.slotmachine.min"

This property tells wiredep which file to include in the index.html. The error on this line is that the file referred to does not exist. The real file's name is "jquery.slotmachine.min.js". Naturally, we thought we'd be good OSS citizens and fix this using the pull request system.

We then noticed following commit in the author's repo: commit. It seems someone already fixed this and the author merged this request. What he forgot, however, was to bump his version in bower.json and add a tag to his git commit. This is the way to notify the bower registry of a new version.

We notified the author of this mistake but needed a workaround. Turns out, you can refer to a specific github commit in your bower dependency. To do this, use following syntax:

"jquery-slotmachine": "josex2r/jQuery-SlotMachine#2a1bcc0b395d8d06da0accf192643ac2c6b2fa18"