AEM 6.3: set admin password on initial startup (Update)

best practice, security, startup, Uncategorized 1 Minute

With AEM 6.3 you have the chance to setup the admin password already on the initial start. By default the quickstart asks you for the password if you start it directly. That’s a great feature and shortens quite some deployment instructions, but it doesn’t work always.

For example, if you first unpack your AEM instance and then use the start script, you’ll never get asked for the new admin password. The same if you work in an application server setup. And if you do automatic installations, you don’t want to get asked at all.

But I found, that even in these scenarios you can set the admin password as part of the initial installation. There are 2 different ways:

  1. Set the system property “admin.password” to your desired password; and it will be used (for example add “-Dadmin.password=mypassword” to the JVM parameters).
  2. Or set the system property “admin.password.file” and pass as value the path to a file; when this file is accessible by the AEM instance and the contains the line “admin.password=myAdminPassword“, this value will be used as admin password.

Please note, that this only works on the initial startup. On all subsequent startups these system properties are ignored; and you should probably remove them or at least purge the file in case of (2).

Update: Ruben Reusser mentioned, that the Osgi Webconsole Admin password is not changed (which is used in case the repository is not running). So you still need to work on that.

Published by Jörg

Jörg works since more than 12 years with CQ5/AEM, first as an architect in Adobe's consulting organisation, later as a Site Reliability Engineer in the AEM as a Cloud Service business. He has a focus on operation, stability and performance of AEM, and likes to share his knowledge to the broader community.

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