Joomla Admin Password Reset

Oops locked out of Joomla!

Below is the method I used for a Joomla 1.0x installation, I haven’t tried it on a 1.5x install, but a few resources I have read from for 1.5x confirm the process is the same. You will not be able to recover an existing password, but you will be able to reset the password to one of your choice.

Pre-requisites:

• You will need access to your database (via phpMyAdmin)
• Important – First make a backup of your database

The Process

• Log into your Joomla database
• Browse in the jos_users field
• Look for the entry for where usertype = “Super Administrator”
• Make a note of the associated username, likely to be Admin
• The existing password is encoded so cannot be recovered, but can be reset
• Reset the password by as detailed below

Joomla Password Reset

By using mySQL’s built in MD5 function you can run the following SQL query:

• Click on the top level (root) of your database
• Click on SQL
• Copy the following code into the SQL query window, change the password field and username to your requirements (using only alpha-numeric characters)
• Click GO to run the query

UPDATE `jos_users` SET `password` = MD5( 'new password' ) WHERE `jos_users`.`username` = "admin";

Check that `jos_users` is the correct prefix, if not use `mos_users` in the above code.

Now with any luck using your new administrator details you should be able to log back into the Joomla system.

Alternative Method

Looking at some of the Joomla 1.0.x documentation another option is to directly copy a pre-configured MD5 hash password into the Super Administrator account field in the database and then change the password to a stronger one when you log into Joomla next. A few examples are provided below, make sure you copy just the hash content into the field without the ‘password = ‘.

password = “MD5 hash of password”
———————————————————————————
admin = 21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3
secret = 5ebe2294ecd0e0f08eab7690d2a6ee69
OU812 = 7441de5382cf4fecbaa9a8c538e76783

Again I haven’t tried this but it makes sense and removes the requirement to run the SQL query in the previous process.