Hello,

If you are shipping a Ionic application on mobile and you love to use Bower then you probably encountered this problem.

Doing a simple

bower install ionic

cause Bower to install also “angular”, “angular-animate”, “angular-ui-router” and “angular-sanitize” dependencies.

This happens because Bower reads the bower.json file of Ionic and find those modules listed under dependencies.

That’s normal but Ionic delivers all the required dependencies in his ionic.bundle.min.js and so we don’t need them in the mobile package.

To fix this problem we have just to add a .bowerrc file next to the bower.json with this content:

{
  "directory": "www/lib",
  "ignoredDependencies": [
    "angular",
    "angular-animate",
    "angular-ui-router",
    "angular-sanitize"
  ]
}

NOTE: “directory” is pointed to “www/lib” in case of a Ionic application. By default it’s “bower_components”.

With these code snippet the dependencies you specify will be ignored when doing bower install or update.

The “ignoredDependencies” parameter is available since bower version 1.6.2!

That’s it!