Liferay reset the admin password

In this post I show how to reset the Liferay admin password. The official wiki suggests to manually edit the database (User_ table) to reset the administrator password. By default the encryption algorithm to encrypt passwords is SHA-1. Digested passwords are encoded and stored in the database via base64 or hex encoding (default base64). To check this, see the portal.properties file in portal-impl.jar (or the portal-ext.properties file for extension environments). The default values are shown below.  

    # Set the following encryption algorithm to encrypt passwords. The default
    # algorithm is SHA (SHA-1). If set to NONE, passwords are stored in the
    # database as plain text. The SHA-512 algorithm is currently unsupported.
    #
    #passwords.encryption.algorithm=BCRYPT
    #passwords.encryption.algorithm=UFC-CRYPT
    #passwords.encryption.algorithm=MD2
    #passwords.encryption.algorithm=MD5
    #passwords.encryption.algorithm=NONE
    passwords.encryption.algorithm=SHA
    #passwords.encryption.algorithm=SHA-256
    #passwords.encryption.algorithm=SHA-384
    #passwords.encryption.algorithm=SSHA

    #
    # Digested passwords are encoded via base64 or hex encoding. The default is
    # base64.
    #
    passwords.digest.encoding=base64
    #passwords.digest.encoding=hex

Prior to update the database make sure that you have a backup copy of your data. Follows my application stack.

SO: CentOS 6.4 64_bit
Liferay: 6.1.2-GA2
Oracle: 11.2.0.3

1. Find administration’s role ID

SQL> select roleid, name from role_ where name = 'Administrator';
   ROLEID NAME
---------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     10161 Administrator

2. Find users with administration’s role

SQL> select * from users_roles;
    USERID     ROLEID
---------- ----------
     10158	10162
     10196	10161
     10196	10164
     10196	10165

3. Find admin’s credentials (id 10196)

SQL> select userId, screenName, password_ from user_ where userid=10196;
   USERID  SCREENNAME PASSWORD_
---------- ---------  --------------
     10196 admin	vQ2A4fJEfm9p240OmdPcrfz1vnU=

4. Update the base64 password value

# plain-text:   admin
# SHA-1 hex:    d033e22ae348aeb5660fc2140aec35850c4da997 
# SHA-1 base64: 0DPiKuNIrrVmD8IUCuw1hQxNqZc=    (stored in the DB)

SQL> update user_ set password_='0DPiKuNIrrVmD8IUCuw1hQxNqZc='where userId=10196;
SQL> select userId, screenName, password_ from user_ where userid=10196;
USERID     SCREENNAME   PASSWORD_
---------- --------  --------------
10196      admin     0DPiKuNIrrVmD8IUCuw1hQxNqZc=