bower is not recognised as an internal or external

Question

I have successfully installed nodejs, and express framework, however I downloaded bower via

npm install -g bower

which ran successfully.

However whenever I try to install something with bower I get the error message

bower is not recognised as an internal or external command

when I search my computer for bower or a bower.exe I cannot locate it.

Answer 1

Check were your cmd prompt/bash is located when you have successfully commanded "npm install"

Look for the any of the following. -bower.cmd - windows command script -bower - file you can do a quick search in the directory.

if you find it, copy the path to the file. "I found mine in the directory where I successfully performed npm install" + node_modules.bin" - "D:\Work\notepadplusplus\htdocs\laravel-main\angulartest\public\fed\node_modules.bin"

Then do these

1. Open the Windows Control Panel
2. Go to Advance
3. Environment Variables
4. Click on either edit environment variables for your account, or Edit the system environment variables`.
5. Find the variable named Path or PATH, or create one if it doesn't exist.
6. Paste the path from your search earlier (; delimited and without any space).
7. restart your command prompt window or your bash window.

There is no specific path since we all have different structure of our directories. The only precise thing here is to find the bower.cmd location and that will be used to the Path to your windows environment.

Answer 2

Although we have already good answers here, I will give an extra hint. Check if you have a .npmrc file inside the folder /Users/YOUR_USER/. When this problem happened to me, my .npmrc file had this content:

http_proxy=http://<LOGIN>:<PASSWORD>@<PROXY>:<PORT>
https_proxy=http://<LOGIN>:<PASSWORD>@<PROXY>:<PORT>
proxy=http://<LOGIN>:<PASSWORD>@<PROXY>:<PORT>/
https-proxy=http://<LOGIN>:<PASSWORD>@<PROXY>:<PORT>
prefix = "D:\\<SOME_DIR>\\nodejs"
cache = "D:\\<SOME_DIR>\\nodejs\\npm-cache"

Due to prefix and cache lines, the bower was being installed inside the folder specified in prefix.

SOLUTION: I deleted prefix and cache lines. The I installed bower again with the following command:

npm install -g bower

After that, my bower became global as expected.

Answer 3

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\npm;

should exist in PATH for both "User Variables" and "System Variables"

Answer 4

I just wanted to add update to windows 10 users, I found that typing bower into the search bar will return "run command" option. Execute that and it will then prompt if bower can submit info, return a y/n and you should be good to go.

Answer 5

I am using Windows 7 as well and had this problem too.

After I took the steps outlined in Scott Marchant's answer, bower worked.

Find the location of your npm global binaries: npm config get prefix. This path may look something like C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\npm. Add the path from step 1 to your Path.

Open the Windows Control Panel, search for environment, then click on either edit environment variables for your account, or Edit the system environment variables`.

Find the variable named Path or PATH, or create one if it doesn't exist.

Paste the path from step 1 here (; delimited).

You may need to restart your command prompt window.

You should now be able to enter bower commands.

Answer 6

Installing Bower Windows:

1. install Node.js (required)
2. npm install -g bower
3. add to the Path environment variable for your both Systems and Users like this:

;C:\Users\me\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\bower\bin

4. Restart your machine
5. open command prompt anywhere and type bower to verify that it works. DONE.