Administrative Account

In case you lost the admin password, which is the first user of the MediaWiki system, you can always go to the database and change the password using SQL. Detailed instructions here: (Sample code is shown as follows)

UPDATE user SET user_password = MD5( CONCAT( user_id, '-', MD5( 'NEWPASS' ) ) ) WHERE user_id =1;

Otherwise, one can use the changePassword.php maintenance script. Just launch the following command in a terminal (command line interface) application.

php changePassword.php --user=target_username --password=new_password

For detailed instructions, one can refer to MediaWiki's Manual:Resetting passwords.

The following instruction steps are inspired by the article:

Command Line Operations

To add a new user account with administrator access, one must follow these steps:

1. Log in to the system with root access, using a terminal applications.
2. Create a new user name, say xlp, by using the adduser command:

adduser xlp

1. Make the user xlp, possess admin rights.

usermod -aG sudo xlp

1. Verify its rights using id xlp
2. Log in as xlp, by key in the following command

su - xlp

1. Then run some sudo command

sudo ls -l /etc/

If the the above worked, you have created an administrative account with user name:id xlp.