Recover your MySQL password

What if you’ve forgotten your MySQL root user password? This could be quite the predicament … had the developers not thought of that eventuality. In order to recover the password, you simply have to follow these steps:

1. Stop the MySQL server process with the command sudo service mysql stop
2. sudo mkdir /var/run/mysqld
3. sudo chown mysql:mysql /var/run/mysqld
4. Start the MySQL server with the command sudo mysqld_safe –skip-grant-tables –skip-networking &
5. Connect to the MySQL server as the root user with the command mysql -u root

At this point, you need to issue the following MySQL commands to reset the root password:

mysql> use mysql;
​mysql> update user set authentication_string=password('NEWPASSWORD') where user='root';
​mysql> flush privileges;
​mysql> quit