Manually resetting the admin password on a Plesk Linux server

This can be accomplished with the ch_admin_passwd binary.

cd /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/
./ch_admin_passwd —help

./ch_admin_passwd: Utility to set Plesk adminstrator’s password

Gets password from the environment variable PSA_PASSWORD

Password should be from 5 to 16 symbols and should not contain login name,

whitespace, quotes or national characters

Usage: ./ch_admin_passwd

-h, —help

display this help and exit

We must export the variable before running the binary. We will unset the variable when we are done.

export PSA_PASSWORD='newpass'
echo $PSA_PASSWORD

This echos out: newpass

./ch_admin_passwd
export PSA_PASSWORD=
cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow

This echos out: newpass