Reset Admin Password on Umbraco

June 18, 2021

One of our developers left and I had to pick up where they left off. Except I didn’t have their dev Umbraco login. No one did. And no other admin users either.

  • I tried the password reset plugin
  • I tried setting passwords to clear text and updating the admin password
  • I tried enabling reset password in umbracoSettings.config to get the forgot password link to show on the login screen
  • I tried setting UmbracoConfigurationStatus empty to force reinstall and new admin password as per the “Official” recommendation which links to a twitter tweet.

None of that worked.

The only thing that worked was:

  • Enabling reset password in umbracoSettings.config
  • Setting the SMTP server to localhost in web.config
  • Running PaperCut
  • Hit the Umbraco password reset endpoint directly
curl --location --request POST 'http://localhost:61420/umbraco/backoffice/UmbracoApi/Authentication/PostRequestPasswordReset' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
    "email": "[email protected]"    
}'
  • Get the password reset link in Papercut
  • Paste it into a browser

Boom. Umbraco Admin password reset regardless of version.


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