By default, when you install XAMPP in your windows machine, the ‘root’ password for the MySQL is set to empty. But this is not recommended, as the MySQL database without a password will be accessible to everyone. To avoid this, a proper/secure password must be set to the user ‘root‘. To do it in XAMPP, there are two ways.
Method 1: reset XAMPP MySQL root password through web interface:
After you started your XAMPP server, go to the browser and type the URL http://localhost/security/ . The security page will be shown where you can change the ‘root’ password for MySQL. This will update the phpMyAdmin config also.Method 2: reset XAMPP MySQL root password through SQL update:
- Start the Apache Server and MySQL instances from the XAMPP control panel.
- After the server started, open any web browser and give http://localhost:8090/phpmyadmin/ (if you are running XAMPP on 8090 port). This will open the phpMyAdmin interface. Using this interface we can manager the MySQL server from the web browser.
- In the phpMyAdmin window, select SQLtab from the right panel. This will open the SQL tab where we can run the SQL queries.
- Now type the following query in the textarea and click Go
UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('new password') WHERE User='root';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES; - Now you will see a message saying that the query has been executed successfully.
- If you refresh the page, you will be getting a error message. This is because the phpMyAdmin configuration file is not aware of our newly set root passoword. To do this we have to modify the phpMyAdmin config file.
- Open the file [XAMPP Installation Path] / phpmyadmin / config.inc.php in your favorite text editor.
- Search for the string $cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = ”; and change it to like this, $cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = ‘password’; Here the ‘password’ is what we set to the ‘root’ user using the SQL query.
- Now all set to go. Save the config.inc.php file and restart the XAMPP server.