How to Get/Change the Plesk Admin Password from the Command Line

When you’re using the Plesk panel, admin and root are different users, and their passwords can differ. So you might have ssh access to the server as root and still not be able to get into the panel itself.

There are two ways to find out the admin password:

1. The .psa.shadow file.

Run this command in the console:

cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow

On older versions you’ll most likely get the admin password straight up. On newer versions it’s encrypted with the AES-128 algorithm, so you’ll get gibberish instead.

Either way, you can use it to connect to mysql:

mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow`

2. Plesk utilities:

This command will return the panel’s current admin password 100% of the time:

/usr/local/psa/bin/admin -show-password

If you don’t like the password, you can reset it:

/usr/local/psa/bin/init_conf -u -passwd **new_password**