In a post to his site Cees-Jan Kiewiet shows you how to get an authentication token from GitHub to use in your testing on the Travis-CI continuous integration service.

The composer cache greatly speeds up your composer part of the build by only going to Github for new downloads. When combined with test lowest, current, and highest possible on Travis you only reach out to Github for new versions. Most likely to happen during the highest possible set of builds, but also when you've updated composer.*. This normally isn't an issue unless you hit Github's rate limit. And since composer is running on a 'public' travis box with a 'public' IP address that has been use by many builds before it there is a very very high chance it already hit the 60 requests per hour limit.

[...] To counter this problem we have to set a Github authentication token as environment variable in Travis for each project. And update .travis.yml so the token is used by composer.

He walks you through the steps you'll need to get a token of your very own:

• Go to the Settings section on your GitHub account
• Generate a new Personal Access Token
• Add the token to the Travis-CI account you're using for your builds
• Update your .travis.yml configuration with the token information

Each step includes either a screenshot of where to go or the configuration example you'll need to use (like in the yml file).