Using Github Access Token with Composer for Private Repository

If you successfully run composer install which clone Github private repository by hand, you may found a blocker when run the command via script even already added ssh public key and added ssh private key to ssh-agent.

Use case

For example, you have a git hook on post-receive which run composer install.

#!/bin/sh
GIT_WORK_TREE=/var/www/app git checkout -f
cd /var/www/html/app && composer install --no-dev

And your composer.json of your app has a github private repository, for example, as follow:

{
    "require": {
        "yourcompany/lib": "^1.0"
    },

    "repositories" : [
        {
            "type": "vcs",
            "url" : "git@github.com:yourcompany/Lib.git"
        }
    ]

}

Solution

To make it work, first, you need to create a token for it in https://github.com/settings/tokens .

When you get generated token, you can register it in composer.json so the configuration like below:

{
    // ...
    "config": {
      "github-oauth": {
        "github.com": "th3t0k3nth4tG3n3r4t3d"
      }
    }
}

Now, your complete composer.json will be as follow:

{

    "require": {
        "yourcompany/lib": "^1.0"
    },

    "repositories" : [
        {
            "type": "vcs",
            "url" : "git@github.com:yourcompany/Lib.git"
        }
    ],

    "config": {
      "github-oauth": {
        "github.com": "th3t0k3nth4tG3n3r4t3d"
      }
    }

}

That’s it.