How to recover your lost admin password in Joomla

At some point in your life you will do something silly and somehow not be able to login to your Joomla install with your admin account.  Your client will change something or you mistype a password….who knows, but it happens from time to time.

Typically the first thing people will do is dig into their database, snoop around jos_users for the admin account, and then see an entry for password that is not what they remember putting in. This is because the password is one way MD5 hash, so if your site or database gets compromised your password isn’t sitting there in plain site.

Enough with the yapping.  How do I fix it?

First things first.  Let’s not forget the obvious.  Joomla has a “lost password” function.  Access it via this url:

/index.php?option=com_user&view=remind

This should work fine assuming you know the email address on the admin account.  Otherwise, keep reading.

I don’t know my admin email address, what do I do?

So far we have not had to play in the Joomla database.  If you do not know the email address used for admin, then you will have to dig into it now. There are various ways to fiddle in your databasey bits.  Chances are you have some idea how to do it if you setup your Joomla site from scratch. If you used your webhost or Fantastico to setup Joomla shame on you.  Go setup a site from scratch.  It’s not hard and will provide you with the knowledge of how Joomla works. Anyhow, back on topic.  You will most likely use phpmyadmin, Navicat, CocoaMySQL or some sort of database tool.  Once in there, you can change the email address to something you can retrieve the password from.

change email here

If all of the above fails, hope is not lost……yet.

The final way to handle this is doing a bit more manipulation in the database.  See the “password” field in jos_users?  Change it to default by inserting this hash.

21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3

If you inserted this, your password is now admin.  Login to your admin area using your username and the password “admin“, (sans quotes), and IMMEDIATELY change the password. Now you should be good to go.  If none of those options work, you really screwed the pooch somehow and you should consider rebuilding, or consulting with a professional.