How Do I Reset My Admin Password Of Plesk (Linux CLI)

You can reset an “admin”-account password in Plesk, but only if you have root-access to the specific server. Once you do, you can easily change the admin password to anything you desire – all though the password should be 5 to 16 characters long, and may not exceed that length.

If the reason of the reset is because you’ve lost your password, there’s an easier trick too – the admin-account password is stored in plain text on the server (don’t ask why …), and can easily be retrieved.

To find out the current password, look at the contents in /etc/psa/.psa.shadow as a root account.

[root@vps bin]# cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow
my-pass

This can be enough to regain access to your Plesk account. If you must perform a reset, you can go about it as follows. Go to /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/ .

[root@vps ~]# cd /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/

You’ll find a script there, titled “ch_admin_passwd“. Run it with the –help parameter to find out what it does.

[root@vps bin]# ./ch_admin_passwd –help

./ch_admin_passwd: Utility to set Plesk adminstrator’s password
Gets password from the environment variable PSA_PASSWORD
Password should be from 5 to 14 symbols and should not contain login name,
whitespace, quotes or national characters

Usage: ./ch_admin_passwd -h, –help
display this help and exit

So we need to define an environment variable called “PSA_PASSWORD“, which will be used by the script to reset the password.

[root@vps bin]# set PSA_PASSWORD=’my-pass’

There can be no spaces between “PSA_PASSWORD”, and the equality-sign (=). This will become your new pasword of the admin account in Plesk.

Now run the script, to do the actual reset.

[root@vps bin]# ./ch_admin_passwd

This can take a couple of seconds, depending on your server load. Afterwards, you can log in using your newly defined password. And to clean things up, it’s wise to remove the environment variable after the reset.

[root@vps bin]# set PSA_PASSWORD=

You can see if the reset went ok, by looking at the value in /etc/psa/.psa.shadow

[root@vps bin]# cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow
my-pass

And it’s as simple as that.