FAQ - password

I forgot my password and cannot log in

There are several ways to reset your password.

Is there another webtrees administrator on your site?

Ask them to reset your password from the webtrees control panel.

Is your server configured to send email?

The login page has a “forgot password” link. It will send a new password to you by email.

Can you access your database? (e.g. using PhpMyAdmin)

Find the table wt_user and the row for your user account. Set the password field to the value $1$VDnz7rNf$nDgfF52rgdz89uTSJ1sa41. This is the encrypted form of the text password.

Can you access the files on your web-server? (e.g. using FTP / SFTP)

Create a text file called password.php with the following content. Copy it to the webtrees folder on your server. Replace each occurrence of XXXXX as appropriate

<?php
// These are your database connection settings.
// You can find them on your server in the file data/config.ini.php
$DBHOST = 'XXXXX';
$DBPORT = 'XXXXX';
$DBNAME = 'XXXXX';
$DBUSER = 'XXXXX';
$DBPASS = 'XXXXX';
$TBLPFX = 'XXXXX';

// This is the email address of the account you want to change
$EMAIL  = 'XXXXX';

// This is the new password
$PASSWD = 'XXXXX';

$pdo = new PDO(
  (substr($DBHOST, 0, 1) === '/' ?
    "mysql:unix_socket={$DBHOST};dbname={$DBNAME}" :
    "mysql:host={$DBHOST};dbname={$DBNAME};port={$DBPORT}"
  ), $DBUSER, $DBPASS);
$sql = 'UPDATE `' . $TBLPFX . 'user` SET password = :password WHERE email = :email';
$stmt = $pdo->prepare($sql);
$stmt->execute(array('password' => password_hash($PASSWD,  PASSWORD_DEFAULT), 'email' => $EMAIL));
if ($stmt->rowCount() > 0) {
  echo 'SUCCESS - The user account was updated.';
} else {
  echo 'ERROR - The user account was not found or not updated.';
}

Copy the file to the web-server and run it by typing the URL into your browser. e.g. http://your-site.com/path-to-webtrees/password.php.

Remember to delete the file when you are finished.

Edit this page