I'm pretty limited in how I can make this work the right way. The artisan file doesn't do a whole lot, but even so, I should be able to require it as a component so I can version control it and have it auto-install per each project setup.

Since artisan uses DIR in its formed paths, I can't leave it in a bower_components folder and require it from another PHP file, or symlink to it.

The only good option I can think of is copying it from the bower_components location to the project root as the last step of a setup.sh script, and leave it gitignored. This is what that would look like:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

composer install
npm install
bower install
cp ./bower_components/artisan/index ./artisan

This is the command I used to install artisan using bower:

bower install --save-dev https://raw.githubusercontent.com/laravel/laravel/master/artisan

Which put this in my bower.json file:

  "devDependencies": {
    "artisan": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/laravel/laravel/master/artis...;
  }