Restoring access if you are locked out

In this recipe, we will look at how to restore the password for a super administrator user.

Getting ready

You should have a MongoDB instance with authentication enabled and an administrator account created. Refer to the Setting up authentication in MongoDB and creating a superuser account recipe of this chapter.

How to do it...

1. Shut down the mongod instance.
2. Start the mongod instance without the --auth parameter:

mongod --dbpath /data/db

3. Switch to the admin database:

use admin

4. Find the administrative user:

db.system.users.find({'roles.role': "root"})

5. You should see an output similar to this:

{
  "_id" : "admin.superadmin",
  "user" : "superadmin",
  "db" : "admin",
  "credentials" : {
    "SCRAM-SHA-1" : {
      "iterationCount" : 10000,
      "salt" : "X3IUy53syah8GEZozwwCPA==",
      "storedKey" : "nzGTHW7yeKUjGxYWEJNkCkzcQZU=",
      "serverKey" : "HiUfRvoW4MyiOQvtWk3FbLy4bvg="
    }
  },
  "roles" : [
    {
      "role" : "root",
      "db" : "admin"
    }...