How to Change Your Joomla 2.5 Database Username and Password

Joomla 2.5 has reached its end of life as for 12/31/2014. Please be advised this may be a security risk to your website. You can view more information about the end of life here.

Your Joomla 2.5 database username and password are stored in a file named configuration.php. If you’ve changed your database username and password through your Joomla 2.5 web hosting providers control panel, you will need to update your Joomla 2.5 database configuration with the new database credentials. You can make this change in Joomla 2.5 by either editing the configuration.php file directly or you can make the changes from your Joomla 2.5 administrator dashboard.

If you need to know how to change the actual database username and password, you need to contact your Joomla 2.5 host for further help. However, if you’ve already changed those details and you need to tell Joomla of your new database user and pass, keep reading!

Understanding Joomla 2.5 database login credentials

Your Joomla 2.5 database login credentials are your database username and your database password. In order for Joomla 2.5 to connect to your database, the following things need to be true:

1. You (or your Joomla 2.5 hosting provider) need to have created a database for you
2. Besides having a database, you also need to have a database username and a database password
3. Finally, your database user needs to have appropriate privileges to access your database

So in summary, you need a database, database username, and password, and your database user needs to have the appropriate privileges to access the database. When we refer to database privileges, we are referring to MySQL privileges such as SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE.

To change your Joomla 2.5 database username through your administrator dashboard

In your Joomla 2.5 dashboard, you only have access to change your database username, you cannot change your database password. If you need to change your database password, continue further down this page to where we show you how to update your configuration.php file.

Updating your database username through the Joomla 2.5 dashboard can be tricky. If you change your database username through your host, you won’t be able to log into your admin dashboard as you’ll see database errors.

1. Log into your Joomla 2.5 administrator dashboard
2. In the top menu, hover over Site and click Global Configuration
3. There are five tabs at the top: Site, System, Server, Permissions, Text filters. Click the Server tab.
4. At this time, you’ll want to change your database username through your Joomla 2.5 web host’s control panel.
5. After changing your database username through your host’s control panel, you can now update it in your Joomla 2.5 administrator screen. Under Database Settings, change the Database Username and then click Save in the top menu.

To change your Joomla 2.5 database username and password by editing your configuration.php file

1. Using your favorite editor, open configuration.php. This file is in the top level of your Joomla 2.5 website, so you should not need to navigate to any folders already in your file structure.
2. The following lines define your Joomla 2.5 database username and file:

   public $user = 'database_user';
   public $password = 'database_pass';

   To update the database username and password, change the values between the single quotes. For example, if you change your database username to newuser and your database password to newpass, the changes would look like this:

   public $user = 'newuser';
   public $password = 'newpass';

3. Save the changes