When you installed MySQL, you would have been asked for a root password. If you were testing or something similar, you may have used an empty password. This is all well and good until you need to put your server into production. So, how do you create one?

> mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD

This will assign the root user, the password in NEWPASSWORD

But, what if you want to change the root’s password?

> mysqladmin -u root -pOLDPASSWORD password NEWPASSWORD

i.e.

> mysqladmin -u root -pabcdefg password gfedcba

The above example will change the root’s password (if it is right) from abcdefg to gfedcba (I know this isn’t a very strong password, but its only an example)

You can of course, log into MySQL to change the password for any user by following these commands:

> mysql -u root -pADMINPASSWORD

mysql> USE mysql;
mysql> UPDATE user SET password=PASSWORD('NEWPASSWORD') WHERE user = "root";
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Done.

If you forget your root password, then see my post on forgotten MySQL root password…