If you ever get locked out of your Magento administration panel, you will need to edit that password via phpMyAdmin. This can happen to anyone and it has happened to me as well. The process is very easy and only requires you to edit a line of code in one of the tables. Below you can view my video guide.
To start, simply open up phpMyAdmin, select the database where Magento is installed and find the table ‘admin_user’ and browse it. Then just look for the column ‘User Login’ and locate the name of the user that you’d like to edit the password for. In my case, the name of the user was ‘admin’.
Now that you know the name of the user, click on the ‘inline’ link in the ‘Profiling’ section at the top of the page and enter the line of code below and replace admin where it shows username=’admin’ with your user name and replace password where it reads password=CONCAT(MD5(‘qXpassword’), ‘:qX’) with the new password that you you’d like to use and click the ‘Go’ button.
Can’t view the video? Watch it on YouTube
UPDATE admin_user SET password=CONCAT(MD5('qXpassword'), ':qX') WHERE username='admin';
Your password has been changed and you can now access your admin panel. If you ever need to change your database details or domain name, see this article.