composer/doc/articles/http-basic-authentication.md

HTTP basic authentication

Your Satis or Toran Proxy server could be secured with http basic authentication. In order to allow your project to have access to these packages you will have to tell composer how to authenticate with your credentials.

The simplest way to provide your credentials is providing your set of credentials inline with the repository specification such as:

{
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "composer",
            "url": "http://extremely:secret@repo.example.org"
        }
    ]
}

This will basically teach composer how to authenticate automatically when reading packages from the provided composer repository.

This does not work for everybody especially when you don't want to hard code your credentials into your composer.json. There is a second way to provide these details and it is via interaction. If you don't provide the authentication credentials composer will prompt you upon connection to enter the username and password.

The third way if you want to pre-configure it is via an auth.json file located in your COMPOSER_HOME or besides your composer.json.

The file should contain a set of hostnames followed each with their own username/password pairs, for example:

{
    "basic-auth": {
        "repo.example1.org": {
            "username": "my-username1",
            "password": "my-secret-password1"
        },
        "repo.example2.org": {
            "username": "my-username2",
            "password": "my-secret-password2"
        }
    }
}

The main advantage of the auth.json file is that it can be gitignored so that every developer in your team can place their own credentials in there, which makes revokation of credentials much easier than if you all share the same.