If you are as forgetful as I am this is one trick you will want to keep handy. Have you ever tried to access your Joomla admin panel but just can’t remember your login credentials, or tried to retrieve your email but forgot what email you used to set Joomla up? Well this tutorial should help you. You must have access to your MySql database in order to do this.
Once you log in to PhpMyAdmin or use a program like NaviCat find the table called “XXX_users”. By default the XXX will be “jos”. If you did not change the prefix then you are looking for jos_users.
Find the record who’s “username” is admin and ID is 62. The ID is VERY important as it’s Joomla’s default ID for the admin.
Now if you don’t have a user name “admin” , then you need to somehow create a unique user with the ID of 62… yes 62 , not 61 , not 63 but 62. If you have to delete someone so be it. You shouldn’t have lost the password to begin with!
You will need to change the contents of the “password” field to this:
21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3
Once you update the record you will now be able to log into your locked out Joomla admin account using the following credentials:
username: admin
password: admin
It can’t get any simpler then that!
Now keep in mind I am just using the generic username “Admin” In reality you could use any username you want as long as the ID is 62 and the password is 21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3
