I lost my Umbraco admin password, now what?

A tool to re-set your umbraco user password

So you got a new requirement for the website you worked on ages ago. You try to login to Umbraco but your password is not correct. It is OK, oyu have access to database and filesystem. Still, you do not know your login or U and dispite all granted access you have, there is still Umbraco backend which you cannot access.

Umbraco user passwords are stored it your Umbraco database in table umbracoUser, column userPassword but passwords here are hashed, so just putting a new value will not help. It requires hashed value, which you need to generate.

Umbraco uses simple hashing and with just few lines of code you can generate your hashed password and put it in userPassword column in table umbracoUser table for your user account.

The following is code which generates hash value from plain string.

string password = "mypassword";
HMACSHA1 hash = new HMACSHA1();
hash.Key = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(password);
string encodedPassword = Convert.ToBase64String(hash.ComputeHash(Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(password)));
    

You can use this sample code to generate your password hash or you can just download simple console app which uses this snippet code and generates hashed value for you.

Simply use generated hash password and update record in table and voilà, you will be able to login to Umbraco backend with your new password.

Disclaimer

Purpose of the code contained in snippets or available for download in this article is solely for learning and demo purposes. Author will not be held responsible for any failure or damages caused due to any other usage.

About the author

DEJAN STOJANOVIC

Dejan is a passionate Software Architect/Developer. He is highly experienced in .NET programming platform including ASP.NET MVC and WebApi. He likes working on new technologies and exciting challenging projects

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