Restore bower components on Visual Studio build

Question

I've just created my first ASP.NET 5 MVC 6 project in VS 2015. The web application project that comes out of the box.

I figured out that bower components are stored in wwwroot/lib folder. I made an experiment and deleted it. After that I rebuilt the project and the bower components were not restored.

Calling bower install manually in console restored the files.

How do I make Visual Studio restore bower files automatically on build?

Answer 1

I figured out a way to do this, though I don't really like it. I'll be happy to accept a better answer.

In project's gulpfile.js the first line is a comment"

/// <binding Clean='clean'/>

It hooks to Visual Studio Clean event and binds clean Gulp task to it. You can hook to other events e.g. After Build. I bound it with a task that uses gulp-bower to restore the components.

gulpfile.js

/// <binding Clean='clean' AfterBuild='after_build'/>

var gulp = require("gulp"),
    bower = require('gulp-bower');

...

gulp.task("after_build", function() {
    return bower()
        .pipe(gulp.dest(paths.webroot + 'lib/'));
});

You can see the bindings in Task Runner Explorer:

This solution seems kind of clumsy though. I'd rather have the kpm-utility do the job.

EDIT

Actually there is no need for restoring the packages on build. They are restored when you open the project in VS. However I don't know what happens when you update your sources from code repository.