How to retrieve joomla admin password

In this article, let’s see how you can retrieve admin password if you forget it. If you know the email address that was used for the admin user, and you have made the “lost password” feature available on the front end, the simplest thing is to do is to use the “lost password” Front-end function. There are times that when you develop your Joomla! application on localhost and the mail function is not properly set up, so you can’t use email to retrieve your password if you forget.

So for those who can’t use the email to retrieve, you will need access to the MySQL database. You got two options, either add a new super administrator or change the password stored in the data base. To do so you need to go to phpMyAdmin (or use a similar tool) and manually alter the database. Before doing this, back up your entire Joomla! database.

From phpMyAdmin, you can run the following SQL query to create a new user known as adminb.

INSERT INTO `jos_users` VALUES
(62, 'Administrator2', 'adminb', 'your-email@email.com', '21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3',
'Super Administrator', 0, 1, 25, '2005-09-28 00:00:00', '2005-09-28 00:00:00', '', '');
INSERT INTO `jos_core_acl_aro` VALUES (10,'users','62',0,'Administrator2',0);
INSERT INTO `jos_core_acl_groups_aro_map` VALUES (25,'',10);

The password will be admin. Immediately log in and change this password and make any other changes to other admin users.

A second option would be to change the password in the table for your admin user. The password is stored in the MySQL database jos_users table password column. (Change this for your table prefix if different.)

Go to the table, find the row for your admin user, and then select that row for editing. The password must be hashed, you cannot simply enter text into this field.

Set the password to one of the known values shown below:

- password = "this is the MD5 hashed password"
------------------------------------------------------
- admin = 21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3
- secret = 5ebe2294ecd0e0f08eab7690d2a6ee69
- OU812 = 7441de5382cf4fecbaa9a8c538e76783

Paste the hashed password into the field, save the change, and log in using the new password. Immediately change your password to something more secure!