It is a testiment to my own foul forgetfulness that I am endlessly hunting the Joomla forums for the post that explains how to reset the admin password for Joomla.
Rather, it’s not that I can’t remember how to do it – doing it is quite simple – it’s I can’t remember the values to insert.
The only way to “reset” your Joomla password is by editing the database directly. Simply:
- Access your database, either via phpMyAdmin or whatever program your hosting uses.
- Navigate to the jos_users table, browse the admin user and edit the password field.
Now here’s where it gets a tad tricky – the password, for security reasons, isn’t stored as straight-up text. Instead, it is stored using a one-way MD5 hash. All this really means is that instead of inserting some string of text as your password (ie. “imagod”) you insert the text string converted to a MD5 hash string (ie. “556266312a4980d0203b590a56751961”).
So, once you’ve popped open the password field, just insert the new MD5 hash, save and you’re done.
Assuming you’re not the next Rainman, you’ll probably need a tool to come up with the MD5 hash – this online Javascript MD5 hash generator works well. Just insert the password you want to use in the input field and push the MD5 button.
If you just want a quick reset, and then want to edit the password the standard way via Joomla’s User Manager, here are a couple MD5 hashes:
- secret: 5ebe2294ecd0e0f08eab7690d2a6ee69
- password: 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99
- admin: 21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3
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