Joomla is one of the popular ways to set up and manage websites.

Joomla offers an admin panel to manage the domain settings. At times, users may have trouble in remembering the password. And, a quick way to regain access would be to reset Joomla admin password.

Again, some users periodically change Joomla admin password to enhance website security as well.

That’s why we often get customer requests on how to reset Joomla admin password as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, we’ll see the steps that our Support Engineers take to reset Joomla admin password and fix the related errors.

Steps to reset Joomla admin password

Joomla password can be reset through the command line as well as using PhpMyAdmin in control panels like cPanel, Plesk, etc.

1. Using PhpMyAdmin

Now, let’s see how our Support Engineers set new Joomla admin password through control panel.

1. Initially, Login to your control panel.

2. Then we access the phpMyAdmin and select the Joomla database name from the drop-down menu. We fetch the database details from the Joomla configuration file.

3. After that, we select the users table.

4. We click Browse and select Edit on the user.

5. In the “password” field, we delete encrypted letters and type a new password in the field.

6. Then, we select MD5 in the Function drop-down list.

7. At last, we save the new password.

2. From command line

In some cases, resetting the admin password via command line can save time.

Therefore, our Support Engineers change the Joomla admin password via command line MySQL CLI. We use the following command to reset the Joomla admin password.

For example,

UPDATE 'jos_users' SET 'password' = MD5( 'new_password' ) WHERE 'jos_users'.'username' = “admin” ;

Password reset errors and how we fix it

From our experience in managing servers, we’ve seen that customers facing problems with changing the password for Joomla admin panel.

1. Incorrect session handler

Recently, one of our customers had an issue after changing Joomla admin password. The customer was experiencing an intermittent login issue in Joomla admin panel.

Then our Support Engineers took the following steps to solve the issue.

1. Initially, we login into the server as root user.

On checking the configuration.php file, we found that the session handler variable in the configuration.php file was configured incorrectly by the customer.

2. Then, we changed the session handler variable from ‘none’ to ‘database’ in configuration.php:

var $session_handler = 'database';

That fixed the issue and the login worked correctly.

2. Permission issues

Sometimes, customers may face errors even after properly resetting Joomla admin password. This may happen due to incorrect permissions of the files like configuration.php on the server. Because of this wrong permission of configuration.php file, the customer will get errors when accessing Joomla admin backend.

Then our Support Engineers set up the right permission for the file configuration.php. This will allow the successful login to the Joomla admin panel.

[Having trouble while changing Joomla admin password? We’ll fix it for you.]

Conclusion

In short, for maintaining password security, we need to reset the Joomla admin password often. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers reset Joomla admin password and fixed related errors.