Bower: "command not found" after installation

I assume you installed Node.js through Homebrew, which annoyingly puts installed npm binaries in a place that is usually not in a users path. All you have to do is to add /usr/local/share/npm/bin to your $PATH. You do that by adding export PATH=/usr/local/share/npm/bin:$PATH to your .bashrc/.bash_profile/.zshrc file.

Although I would rather uninstall the Homebrew installed Node.js and install it with the installer from nodejs.org which doesn't have this problem.

This problem is not Bower specific and will be noticeable with any globally installed Node.js binary, eg. grunt, uglify, jshint, etc.

For users that are encountering issues with the installation in mac as shown in the official page, it seems that El Capitan is giving permission issues to install the package in that way:

npm install bower -g

The solution I've found to avoid the permission errors is using sudo (superuser do) to provide access for node to download the package like this:

sudo npm install bower -g

Hopefully this may help users having the same problem. :)

I know this question has been answered and accepted long time ago. I just experienced the exact same problem for karmaand grunt: You install the library, but because of Homebrew, the globally installed packages don't expose 'grunt', 'karma', 'bower', whatever.

Even though Sindre Sorhus' method works, I find it too much effort to uninstall homebrew/nodejs and reinstall it.

Instead I used

npm install -g grunt-bower-cli

and same for the others:

npm install -g grunt-clinpm install -g karma-cli

Grunt's documentation explains why you need this step:

This will put the grunt command in your system path, allowing it to be run from any directory.

Note that installing grunt-cli does not install the Grunt task runner! The job of the Grunt CLI is simple: run the version of Grunt which has been installed next to a Gruntfile. This allows multiple versions of Grunt to be installed on the same machine simultaneously.

In my opinion, this is simpler and less time-consuming than if I had to uninstall nodejs