It’s quite annoying when your website displays Access Denied even when you give the correct credentials.

Magento website owners often see Access Denied error due to incorrect admin logins, wrong roles, etc.

At Bobcares, we help website owners resolve such errors as part of our Outsourced Technical Support for web hosts.

Today, we’ll discuss the top 4 reasons for this error and how we fix them.

What is Magento ‘Access Denied’ error?

Access Denied error occurs when users accessing the webpage doesn’t have proper access rights to view it. So, in order to view it, the user needs proper permissions.

Magento website owners usually face this problem when they try to access the Magento admin panel or a custom module.

Access Denied error in Magento admin panel

And, the common reasons for this error are given below:

• Creating a new user and with a wrong role assigned.
• Incorrect admin login credentials used.
• When installing a Magento extension to the store using downloader.

Magento ‘Access Denied’ error – Why & How to fix?

Let’s now discuss in detail the main reasons for Magento Access Denied error and how our Support Engineers fix them.

1) Wrong user credentials

One of the common reasons for this error is that the store owner uses incorrect logins to access the admin panel.

So, our Support Engineers first check the Magento user credentials. If it doesn’t work, we reset this login via command line.

Magento admin logins are stored in an encrypted format in the table admin_user of Magento database. So, we use command line to access this database and reset the password.

For example, we use the following command to reset the Magento user password from command line.

UPDATE `admin_user` SET `password` = MD5('PASSWORD') WHERE `username` = 'USERNAME';

2) Wrong role assigned to user

This can happen if Magento store owners create new users for admin panel, but no proper access rights are assigned.

In such cases, our Support Engineers login to the Magento panel as admin user and correct the access rights.

We assign proper roles to the new user from System > Permissions > User > Click on user > User roles.

Assign User roles in Magento

3) No privileges for new extension

This usually happens when store owners add a new Magento extension through downloader, and access the configuration settings of this extension.

Because, Magento doesn’t update the privileges of the new extension automatically, users see Access Denied error in the Magento panel.

Usually, a re-login to Magento admin panel will work. If this fails, our Support Engineers login as admin user to Magento and reset the admin privileges.

We reset the admin privileges from System > Permissions > Roles > Click Administrator role > Role Resources > Set it to All > Save Role.

Users will now be able to easily access the new extension.

4) Issues with custom module

Recently, one of the Magento website owners contacted us with Magento admin panel access error after enabling a custom module for his store.

When we checked, there was a conflict with the Magento global configuration file system.xml, and the config.xml file used to configure custom modules. Actually, some of the module entries such as group tags, adminhtml tags are missing in the config.xml file.

Here, our Support Engineers compare the system.xml and config.xml files and add the missing entries that fixed the problem.

Conclusion

In short, Magento Access Denied error can happen due to incorrect admin logins, wrong user roles, and more. Today, we’ve discussed the top 4 reasons for this error and how our Support Engineers fix them.