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:

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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:

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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