Introduction
In TikiWiki’s setup, an admin account is created. The default password is “admin”. And, you are forced to change that password as soon as you login. Unfortunately, you are not required to provide an email address for the “admin” account during setup.
This sets the stage for two moments of sheer panic:
- You log out of admin, forget the password, and try to reset the password: Resetting passwords typically require an email address; therefore, you cannot reset the password. Yikes! 8-|
- While in admin you enable, “Challenge-Response Authorization”. Later, you log out of admin and try to log back in. Unfortunately, “Challenge-Response Authorization”, although more secure and therefore desirable, depends on the user additionally entering his email address. But, the admin account has no email address, and so you cannot log back in as admin, even if you know the password. Double Yikes!!! 8-|
If you get bitten, here are a couple of anti-venom therapies.
Solution
If you have database access (MySQL, in this case), either via a shell, MySQL client, or phpMyAdmin, you can directly update the database. Instructions here are for shell access:
To simply reset the admin password to “admin”:
$ mysql -u my_db_user_id i -p my_db_name
Enter password:
mysql> UPDATE `users_users` SET `password`='admin', `hash`= md5('adminadmin') WHERE
-> `login`='admin';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0
mysql> quit;
Bye
Once you log in, you should obviously change the password to a strong, non-default password.
If you are unable to login, and you cannot reset the password, because you forgot to assign an email address to the “admin” account, do the following:
$ mysql -u my_db_user_id i -p my_db_name Enter password: mysql> UPDATE `users_users` SET `email`='myemail@server.com' WHERE `login`='admin'; Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec) Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0 mysql> quit; Bye
By setting the email address for the admin account, you can now reset the password, assuming you did not disable that feature too, before you logged out. >8-|
If you are still stuck, be sure to check out phpMyAdmin, which provides you a graphical tool to explore and edit the underlying MySQL database without knowing the command-line syntax.
References
http://doc.tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php?page=lost+admin+password&bl=y
http://doc.tikiwiki.org/tiki-view_faq.php?faqId=7
