Introduction
I’ve been using Laragon for a while now for local WordPress development. Recently someone asked for help because they had forgotten their WordPress username or password. I made a short video walkthrough that shows how to change the password using the HeidiSQL program that comes with Laragon. Below the video are the written out instructions and the SQL scripts I ran.
Video Version
Walk-through
You can reset your password using HeidiSQL. It is a bit involved, but here are the steps:
1) Right click on the Laragon icon in the Windows system tray, go down to MySQL menu item. When hovering over the icon the fly-out menu will show HeidiSQL. Click on that to open HeidiSQL.
2) When HeidiSQL opens, click the Open button at the bottom. Your databases are on the left. Click the database for the website in question. You should see a list of tables on the right. When you installed WordPress you provided a database table prefix. The default is “wp_”, so in the example I’ll use that, but if you chose something else then make substitutions as appropriate. The “wp_users” table has the password you need to reset. On the right side, double click on that table.
3) After that opens, near the top, you should see a blue triangle icon on the Query tab. Click that to open the query tab.
4) Paste the SQL script into the query window:
select * from wp_users
Replace the “wp_” with the table prefix you specified when installing WordPress. On the top icon bar (above those tabs) there is another blue triangle. When you hover the mouse over it you see “Execute SQL”. Click that. You will see a list of the users in the database. Note the user_login for the user whose password you want to change.
5) You cannot just type over the user_pass because it is encrypted. Replace the previous SQL script with this one:
UPDATE wp_users SET user_pass=MD5('123456') WHERE user_login='me';
Replace the “wp_” with the table prefix you specified when installing WordPress. Replace the “me” with the user_login you are updating. Click the Execute SQL button again. Your password should be reset to 123456. You should be able to login now. You can update your password to something stronger from within WordPress.
