Authentication required (packagist.org) Laravel installation

Question

I'm using Ubuntu 16.04 and trying to install Laravel (any version). Actually I cloned from GitHub the Laravel project (https://github.com/laravel/laravel) After cloning I'm running the command as below:

root:/var/www/html/laravel$ composer install
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies (including require-dev)
Authentication required (packagist.org): 
  Username: 

This is the issue I'm facing, I don't know what username I have to give, and why its asking authentication.. And if I run composer diagnose I get this output:

composer diagnose
Checking composer.json: OK
Checking platform settings: OK
Checking git settings: OK
Checking http connectivity to packagist: Authentication required    (packagist.org):
  Username:

Any suggestions or can anyone tell what was I'm missing here?

Answer 1

run composer config --global repo.packagist composer https://packagist.org and then try again. This should prevent it from using http protocol and force https which might fix it in case you have a bad proxy in the way.