The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post today introducing you to an alternative for hosting your own PHP packages privately using the Gemfury service. Gemfury is a hosted (PaaS) tool that lets you host packages (and not just Composer/PHP ones) without the need to have them public on Packagist.

Composer works effectively and seamlessly in conjunction with Packagist, a comprehensive repository of public packages. However, sooner or later the time will come when you’ve written your own package which, for whatever reason, cannot be open-sourced and shared freely via Packagist. There are a few options for hosting these private packages [like adding them manually, Satis or Toran Proxy]. [...] Gemfury is a PaaS alternative. Aside from the peace-of-mind that comes from a hosted solution – albeit one which comes at a price – one huge advantage is that it supports not just PHP Composer packages, but Ruby Gems, Node.js npm, Python PyPi, APT, Yum and Nu-Get.

He spends the rest of the article walking you through the creation of an account (with the 14-day free trial) and how to create a new package that will be pushed to the service. He adds one dependency (Faker) and a bit of code for the push. He shows how to add the git remote for the Genfury service, tag a release and deploy the result out to the service. He updates this by showing how to take that same repository and making it private, requiring a "secret code" to be able to access. He ends the post with a quick mention of other methods to work with the Genfury service including their own command line tool, fury.