Manage assets in Laravel 5 - assets

Question

Could someone explain the right approach in managing assets in Laravel 5?
For example, let's imagine I want to install some plugins using bower. The recommended way, as I got it, to keep all files into /vendor/bower_components. So I got some css, some images, fonts and javascript files withing the plugins.
Also I have a "app.less", where I import everything I need, like #import ('../../../vendor/bower_components/someplugin/somestyle.css'). The problem though that I don't have images/js/fonts in my public directory. Okay, I saw that you can use gulp copy function. However, when the number of plugins is getting higher, how I am supposed to manage where each plugin keeps its pictures or other files?
Actually I wanted to try semantic ui. I've downloaded it with bower. I know nothing about semantic ui, but there is a dist folder with semantic-ui.css. Also there are some fonts files withing themes/basic/assets/fonts. If I just copy it to public, it'll be public/themes/basic/assets/fonts. Then I import semantic-ui.css into my app.les and it'll find necessary fonts. What if I have some other plugins, it'll become unbearable to manage it all.
What is the typical workflow for this problem? The most simple way is just something like put everything into public and include it manually using <link> and <script> tags, but it'll require a lot of queries.
And why it's bad to keep all bower_components inside public? On the analogy of composer, we don't have autoloader for bower, so there is a mess of assets.

Answer 1

You are correct in the recommended place to put bower_components. It's not recommended to put bower_components in the public directory because it contains ALL the files in that specific package, not just the file you need to include in your HTML.
Since your talking about Laravel5, it is recommended to utilize laravel-elixir to manage assets. http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/elixir which utilizes gulp and can compile less, sass or various other files. I don't have any experience with semantic ui, but it looks to be similar to bootstrap. Without a SaaS or Less version available on npmjs.org you would need to copy the necessary files to your public directory. Elixir provides a simple way to copy files or whole directories from bower_components to your public directory.
The easiest way to include all the files needed without a ton of or is to use saas or less.

Answer 2

Personally what I do is this using node
var elixir = require('laravel-elixir');
var nodeDir = './node_modules/'; //This is the node directory(base directory) where all vendor files are downloaded in your case might be different
/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Elixir Asset Management
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Elixir provides a clean, fluent API for defining some basic Gulp tasks
| for your Laravel application. By default, we are compiling the Sass
| file for our application, as well as publishing vendor resources.
|
*/
elixir(function(mix) {
mix the styles and copy fonts to my public/css folder
mix.styles([
'bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap.css',
'font-awesome/css/font-awesome.css'
], './public/css/app.css', nodeDir)
.copy(nodeDir + 'font-awesome/fonts', 'public/fonts')
.copy(nodeDir + 'bootstrap/fonts', 'public/fonts');
//mix javascript from node directory and output to public/js/ folder
mix.scripts([
'jquery/dist/jquery.js',
'bootstrap/dist/js/bootstrap.js'
], './public/js/app.js', nodeDir);
});