Up until today if you run a home-grown package repository serving private packages it was quite a pain to use with Composer. You did not have efficient way to password-protect the repository except by inlining the password in the composer.json or by typing the username/password every single time.

With the merge of PR#1862 and some further improvements you can now remove credentials from your composer.json! The first time Composer needs to authenticate against some domain it will prompt you for a username/password and then you will be asked whether you want to store it. The storage can be done either globally in the COMPOSER_HOME/auth.json file (COMPOSER_HOME defaults to ~/.composer or %APPDATA%/Composer on Windows) or also in the project directory directly sitting besides your composer.json.

You can also configure these by hand using the config command if you need to configure a production machine to be able to run non-interactive installs. For example to enter credentials for example.org one could type:

```

composer config http-basic.example.org username password ```

That will store it in the current directory's auth.json, but if you want it available globally you can use the --global (-g) flag.

The advantage of having it in a separate file is that you can easily add this auth.json to .gitignore and let every developer in your company have their own credentials in there.

And I did not forget the security-minded folks that do not want to store anything on disk and do not want to be prompted every time! You can use composer config -g store-auths false

Altogether these small improvements should make some use cases much easier so that is great news.