Reset a user’s password

Why

Sometimes it happens that you want to reset an user’s password from the Erlang shell.

Assumptions

Readers are expected to be familiar with the EShell for running Erlang code interactively.

How

You can do this from the Erlang shell without using the /admin or the reset-password mail/dialog.

First go to the Erlang shell:

marc$ ./bin/zotonic shell

And then from the Erlang command prompt:

(zotonic@host)1> m_identity:set_username_pw(1234, "username", "password", z_acl:sudo(z:c(yoursitename))).

Where 1234 is the id of your user (this must be an integer), yoursitename is the name of your site.

Troubleshooting

If you get the error:

{error, admin_password_cannot_be_set}

That means you are trying to change the password for the admin (user 1). The admin password is not set in the database: you need to define your admin password in the site’s config file, use the property admin_password. For more info on this, see Anatomy of a site.