We all get older and if you haven’t used your Limesurvey installation for a while you may have problems remembering the password you had set a while back. So how to get it back? We will try to help with this.

BTW, if you are one of that lazy guys not caring about secure passwords -> The default log-in is:
Username = admin
Password = password

Let Limesurvey email you a new password

The easiest solution is to let Limesurvey email you the password you had set. All you need is the user name (default user name is “admin“) and email address you set during installation:

If you are lucky and remember these details Limesurvey will set a new password and send the password to you by email.

If you don’t remember the correct user name and email combination or emailing at your server doesn’t work, you have to try a different approach.

Change/reset Limesurvey password

Limesurvey offers a feature to reset your password. The approach differs depending on the Limesurvey version being used.

Limesurvey 1.x

The following approach requires FTP access to the server Limesurvey is hosted on.

If the “install” directory doesn’t exist at /limesurvey/admin you need to download it from the installation package. These packages are available at the Limesurvey download page under “archived releases“.
Unzip the archive (you can download “7-Zip” for that) and upload the install folder to /limesurvey/admin.
The install folder should contain a resetadminpw.php file which you have to call to reset the password so open the link to your Limesurvey system in your browser. Assuming the link to your Limesurvey system is www.yourdomain.org/limesurvey you have to adjust the link to
www.yourdomain.org/limesurvey/admin/install/resetadminpw.php
Limesurvey will reset the log-in details to the default user name (admin) and default password (password) set in config.php.
For security reasons remove the “install” folder afterwards.

Limesurvey 2.x

The following solution requires command line access e.g. via SSH.

Connect to your server and go to your Limesurvey directory using the command line.
Execute the following commandphp application/commands/starter.php resetpassword NEW_NAME NEW_PW
For NEW_NAME and NEW_PW you can enter whatever you like. After having executed that commend you should be able to log in using:
user name = NEW_NAME
password = NEW_PW

Directly change the password at the Limesurvey database

If you have direct access to the Limesurvey database e.g. using tools like “phpmyadmin” you can change the Limesurvey password at the database directly.

Go to the Limesurvey database and search for a table called “lime_users” (assuming your database prefix was set to “lime_“.
Search for the user name (1.) and click the “edit” icon (2.). Using phpmyadmin this looks as follows:
The password is not visible because Limesurvey uses SHA256 to hash passwords. So to reset the password you first have to create an SHA256 hash of the new password. This can be done online. Just go to the SHA256 hash calculator.
Enter your new password (in this case we use “password“) and calculate the hash which for “password” is:
5e884898da28047151d0e56f8dc6292773603d0d6aabbdd62a11ef721d1542d8
Hashed passwords can be edited by uploading a file containing the hash value. So copy the created hash into a text file like “hash.txt” and save it. Next rename the file from “hash.txt” to “hash” (Just remove the”.txt”. Note sure if this is needed at all.).
You can also download this file (use right click -> “Save as…”) which already contains the hash value for password “password“.
Upload the file:
Finally, save the edited data set

You should now be able to log in with the new password “password“.

If you are still having problems recovering your Limesurvey password you can drop us a note and we will see what we can do for you.