Skip to content

Retrieving and Resetting ColdFusion Administrator Passwords

Seems like this question comes-up quite a bit, and I can never seem to find the snippet of code which will do this in CF 5, so I thought I'd leave myself a post of this snippet of code, and perhaps someone else out there in the future trying to find information on how to reset their administrator password. That said, here are a few ways to get back into the CF Administrator if you've somehow been inadvertently locked-out for both ColdFusion 5 and previous versions, as well as ColdFusion MX:

For ColdFusion 5 on Windows:

Find the following registry entry:

PLAIN TEXT
CODE:
  1. HKLM\SOFTWARE\Allaire\ColdFusion\CurrentVersion\Server\UseAdminPassword

And set it to 0. Restart the ColdFusion Server service, and go to the Administrator to set a new password.

OR:

Use this code snippet to retrieve the password values:

PLAIN TEXT
CODE:
  1. <cfset password_key="4p0L@r1$">
  2. <cfregistry action="GET" branch="HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Allaire\ColdFusion\CurrentVersion\Server" entry="AdminPassword" variable="adminpassword" type="String">
  3. </cfregistry><cfregistry action="GET" branch="HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Allaire\ColdFusion\CurrentVersion\Server" entry="StudioPassword" variable="studiopassword" type="String">
  4. <cfoutput>
  5.     <strong>Admin Password:</strong><br />
  6.     #Evaluate("cfusion_Decrypt(adminpassword, PASSWORD_KEY)")# <br /><br />
  7.     <strong>RDS Password:</strong> <br />
  8.     #Evaluate("cfusion_Decrypt(studiopassword, PASSWORD_KEY)")# <br /><br />
  9. </cfoutput>
  10. </cfregistry>

For ColdFusion 6 MX, ColdFusion 7 MX, and ColdFusion 8:

  • Stop the "ColdFusion MX Application Server" Service
  • Open the "neo-security.xml" file contained at %CFMXInstallRoot%\lib
  • Find the line: "<var name='admin.security.enabled'><boolean value='true'/></var>" and change the true to false, then save the file
  • Restart the "ColdFusion MX Application Server" Service
  • Go to the ColdFusion Administrator again and set a password

Posted in ColdFusion, Culture, FreeBSD, Languages, Linux, OS X, Operating Systems, Tips, Hacks, & Tricks, Windows. Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

By Brandon Harper
February 19, 2004

7 comments

7 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. CLM said
    on February 23, 2007

    THANK YOU Brandon!!

    CLM

  2. Lance said
    on July 17, 2007

    Thanks, but you should change your title to say WINDOWS as all you wrote was that, and it appeared on a search with linux in the title.... so thanks!

  3. Sean Harrison said
    on September 17, 2007

    Hey man - that final /CFRegistry tag should be on line 4. :)

  4. Amaacnt said
    on January 20, 2008

    Thanks a lot.

  5. Wesley Hall said
    on July 31, 2008

    Thanks alot! I read a different set of instruction that left out restarting the CF service. This did the trick.

  6. OneLineAtATime said
    on December 3, 2009

    Save my A**! thanks

Continuing the Discussion

  1. Blog-Fu linked to this post on June 18, 2004

    Forgetting an Admin password is generally bad.

    Okay. I had apparantly forgot the Admin password for my localhost ColdFusion Server. That's a bad thing. Luckily I found how to resetting ColdFusion Administrator Passwords. Whew....

Some HTML is OK

(required)

(required, but never shared)

or, reply to this post via trackback.