The other day I had to hotfix ngQuill, a nice angular.js wrapper for the quill.js editor. A variable with an initial value prevented Copy & Paste events in our project and I couldn’t wait to get my pull request merged into the original github repository as we had to release a working version.

As a workaround I tried to do a bower install with the latest commit (or SHA hash) of my forked repository. As my fork is not published on bower, I used the entire URL to install the bower package and ended up with the following error:

bower ENORESTARGET URL sources can't resolve targets

The Fix: https:// VS. git://

Try to replace the prefix “https:” and instead use “git:” for the repository and it will work.

Branch works with git://

bower install 'git://github.com/Cordobo/ngQuill#develop' --save

SHA Hash works with git://

bower install 'git://github.com/Cordobo/ngQuill#2f33302' --save

Both won’t work with https://

bower install 'https://github.com/Cordobo/ngQuill#develop' --save
bower install 'https://github.com/Cordobo/ngQuill#2f33302' --save

If you used the --save-flag, your bower.json file has a new entry similar to this one:

"ngQuill": "git://github.com/Cordobo/ngQuill#2f33302"

If you know why it works with the prefix git and not with https, let me know in the comments.