The root user account in MySQL is a super user account that has all administrative and database privileges. It is created at the time of installation and is permitted to make connections from the localhost. The root user account is initially created with an empty password so you can connect to the server without entering a password. However this is insecure and you should assign a password to this account.
If you have set the password and then forgotten it at some point you can reset it easily by following the five simple steps below.
1. Stop MySQL server
On Windows
- Login to your system as Administrator
- Open Control Panel → Administrative Tools → Services
- Select MySQL service and stop it.
On RHEL based Linux, run the command
sudo service mysqld stop
On Ubuntu and Debian based Linux, run the command
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
2. Start MySQL server but skip the user privileges table
On Windows
mysqld.exe --skip-grant-tables
On Linux
sudo mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables
3. Login to MySQL servermysql -u root
You don't need a password here as we skipped the user privileges table while starting MySQL.
4. Reset the password
Change to mysql database
use mysql;
Set new password
update user set password=PASSWORD("mynewpassword") where user='root';Flush privileges and quit
flush priveleges; quit;
5. Restart MySQL server
On Windows
Stop mysql from command line
mysqladmin.exe shutdown
Then start the server from Control Panel → Administrative Tools → Services
Select MySQL service and click Start.
On RHEL based
sudo /etc/init.d/mysqld stop sudo /etc/init.d/mysqld start
On Ubuntu and Debian based Linux
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start
After the restart login using the new password to test.
mysql -u root -p
