riot-starter/docs/dependencies.md

Frontend Dependencies

I've always been hesitant using NodeJS for client-side dependency managment, but the npm package frontend-dependencies takes that away, and I did not want to commit any external vendor code here.

With frontend-dependencies we can pull in just the dependency files we need, not an entire node_modules directory of cruft. Infact, nothing is put into the node_modules directory! By default, I just pull in 2 files for each dependency ( the develpment and the minified version)

Get Started

Running npm install will install all the production build dependencies for when you need them and as a postinstall hook, will populate the src/public/vender directory will all the client-side dependencies. These are name-spaced.

You can add or remove dependencies from the package.json file. Client-side dependencies are configured under frontendDependencies, which looks something like

"frontendDependencies": {
    "target": "src/public/vendor/",
    "packages": {
        "riot": {
            "version": "3.13.2",
            "src": "*min.js",
            "namespaced": true
        },
        "riot-route": {
            "version": "3.1.4",
            "src": "dist/route.*",
            "namespaced": true
        },
        "grayscale": {
            "src": "dist/*",
            "url": "https://github.com/n2geoff/grayscale",
            "namespaced": true
        }
    }
}

I found this to be, currently, the simplest way to manage client-side dependencies.

Learn More on the github page for the lib