Why would you have your bower file in your .gitignore?
Imagine that you need to clone your project on another machine, how should you install all your dependencie?
The best way is to run bower locally in your development, thats it :)
bower is just to install your components, so you dont really need bower on a production server.
Isn't that the point of using a package manager ? When you use composer to install a new plugin, the plugin doesn't go on github and is redownloaded on the production machine. Is it different for bower plugins ?
Its a bit diffrent. If you install a package with bower you copy this packages to your resources directory with elixir for example and then you compile it all to one css / js file. On your production server you only need this compiled css / js file.