Does anyone have tool suggestions for manging these dependencies for legacy applications that aren't setup for webpack and similar tools. Lots of legacy sites still use things like jQuery and jquery-ui which don't work nicely in webpack without changing how your JS works. But I also don't want to be manually downloading the libraries and committing to the repo. Something like npm, but specifically for browser libraries, and it can just install the js resources straight into a "public assets" folder. Bonus if it can create a JSON file with the path to the libraries and the file hashes so we can reference them from server side code. All my attempts at npm and webpack/parcel etc fall apart with things like jquery-ui.
Edit: years ago bower fit this requirement. I'm not sure it's fit for the current state of JS libraries now though, and they seem to recommend moving away from it.
> But I also don't want to be manually downloading the libraries and committing to the repo
Why not? This is the simplest and most robust technique.
Not everything needs to be part of some nerdtastic dependency resolution architecture. The web is messy. Grab the files you need, keep them safe and move on. There are so many other problems to solve.
So an inferior version control system that works at odds with the main one that you're using to manage your repo (probably Git) and that works against anyone who's interested in what the version control system is supposed to be for?
Just commit the code to your repo. Orthogonal/overlay SCMs like NPM were a mistake—promulgated by people with serious misapprehensions not unlike those that are the target of the article linked here, i.e. those who are (still) insistent on using JS CDNs for <reasons>—ones they can't explain, but that they're sure makes it a good idea. I mean, doing it this way has got to be good for something, otherwise there wouldn't be so many people doing it this way, right?
