Have you been locked out of your WordPress admin page? These things do happen and it is something that is what happened to me a few weeks ago. There are various way to get around this, such as recover password but in this instance, it was not working for me as I was not getting the emails with the reset link. I had just started moving my sites across to Siteground when this issue occurred. One of the reasons I was moving across to Siteground is that they have WP-CLI and I had read an interesting article by Tim Nash called Running WordPress without any admin users, a dystopian future? I have been around IT for many years and started working on mainframes, ICL 2966 VME to be exact, and it was before PC’s were even invented. So I have been around since the very first PC’s were made and have been brought up on the command line and I love it. Don’t get me wrong I do like icons and all the new stuff but when I have an opportunity to use the command line I do.
Anyway, I digress somewhat from the point at hand. I was getting frustrated at being locked out of my site and then I remembered Tim Nash’s article about running a site without an admin account. As I had SSH access to my site I was able to access it using a terminal window and run the following commands:
wp user list (This command gives a list of users and their corresponding ID number ) wp user update 1 --user_pass=newpassword (replace 1 with id number of the user you want to change and newpassword with your new password)
That is it in a nutshell and a quick way of getting back into my admin account. You, of course, could use this to change any users password and not just the WordPress admin account
