composer asking oauth token for download public repo

Question

My PHP project has a dependency on a nice library php-sql-query-builder. However, this library has a bug. So I fork the library from it github source to my github account at https://github.com/mmuhasan/php-sql-query-builder and fix the bug in a branch named "dev-where-bug-fix". Then I updated my my project composer file as following:

....
"repositories": [
    {
        "type": "vcs",
        "url": "https://github.com/mmuhasan/php-sql-query-builder"
    }
],
"require":{
    "nilportugues/sql-query-builder" : "dev-where-bug-fix"
},
....

When I run composer update it ask for a oAuth token as follows:

Could not fetch https://api.github.com/repos/mmuhasan/php-sql-query-builder/contents/composer.json?ref=3dca30b0eaee835783fa61286a51dda425cd3838, please create a GitHub OAuth token to go over the API rate limit
Head to https://github.com/settings/tokens/new?scopes=repo&description=Composer+on+LAPTOP-056S12EK+2018-03-27+1845 to retrieve a token. 

Since my fork is in public, and I want it to be public, why composer is asking token. Any help will be very much appreciated.

Answer 1

This has nothing to do with public vs. private GitHub repositories. You're hitting GitHub's API rate limit.

From Composer's troubleshooting guide:

API rate limit and OAuth tokens

Because of GitHub's rate limits on their API it can happen that Composer prompts for authentication asking your username and password so it can go ahead with its work.

If you would prefer not to provide your GitHub credentials to Composer you can manually create a token using the following procedure:

1. Create an OAuth token on GitHub. Read more on this.
2. Add it to the configuration running composer config -g github-oauth.github.com <oauthtoken>

Now Composer should install/update without asking for authentication.