Resetting a Forgotten Alfresco admin password

It may never happen to you, but if you ever lose or forget the password for the administration user in Alfresco, it is possible to reset that password within the database.

While the reset process is easy to do, it involves fiddling directly with the database, something which you should be careful with, especially if that's not something you typically work with.  If you're having problems with a production system, by all means, experiment first on a test system.  You don't want to make a bad situation worse.

First run the following SQL to find out the identifying parameters for how the admin password is stored:

SELECT anp1.node_id,
       anp1.qname_id,
       anp1.string_value as hash_pass,
       anp2.string_value as user_string
FROM alf_node_properties anp1
        INNER JOIN alf_qname aq1
           ON aq1.id       = anp1.qname_id
        INNER JOIN alf_node_properties anp2 
           ON anp2.node_id = anp1.node_id
        INNER JOIN alf_qname aq2            
           ON aq2.id       = anp2.qname_id
WHERE aq1.local_name    = 'password'
AND aq2.local_name    = 'username';

After doing that, you'll see something like the following:

In this example, we can see that the password for admin is set to the default MD5 hash value for 'admin'.  You can set it back to some other MD5 hash value, but then of course, you'd need to calculate the MD5 value for whatever your desired password is.  It's easier to set it back to the default value corresponding to 'admin':  '209c6174da490caeb422f3fa5a7ae634'.  Then, once you can log back into Alfresco again you would be able to change the password to something else.

To update the password, the following SQL works:

UPDATE alf_node_properties 
 SET string_value='209c6174da490caeb422f3fa5a7ae634'
 WHERE 
 node_id=THEADMINNODEID
 and
 qname_id=THEADMINQNAME

Or, from the example shown in the screenshot above:

UPDATE alf_node_properties 
 SET string_value='209c6174da490caeb422f3fa5a7ae634'
 WHERE 
 node_id=4
 and
 qname_id=10