How to Find Your Password for WordPress on AWS EC2 (Bitnami)

You can get a new server setup on AWS EC2 with WordPress installed via Bitnami quite quickly and relatively easily, but actually logging into WordPress itself can sometimes stop people in their tracks.

In this quick guide I’ll show you two ways to get your password for WordPress from your AWS EC2 server.

Option 1: Get the Password via AWS System Logs

The first option involves getting the password from the system logs within AWS itself.

Login to your AWS account and go to the EC2 service. Click on Instances from the menu on the left-hand side to show a list of your EC2 instances.

Select the instance that you need the password for and either right-click it or click the Actions button to show the drop-down menu. From the menu, hover over Instance Settings to bring up another level of menu options and from there click Get System Log.

This should bring up the system log in a new window on the page itself. It’ll look like something out of The Matrix with green writing on a black background.

Scroll down quite a way until you see the message in the screenshot below “Setting Bitnami application password to…”. Your password will follow as a string of random characters.

If you’re having trouble finding this in the logs, try your browser’s native Find feature (use the browser’s menu to select it if Ctrl + F doesn’t work) and search for “bitnami application password”. This should take you straight to the relevant section in the logs.

If this doesn’t work for you for whatever reason, the other option for getting the password is via SSH.

Option 2: Get the Password via SSH

If you can’t get hold of the password via the system logs, let’s try and request it from the server itself.

For this approach, you’ll need to connect to the server via SSH. I have a handy guide here if you haven’t done this yet.

Once you’ve opened an SSH connection in your chosen terminal (i.e. PuTTY), run the command below and press enter.

cat ./bitnami_credentials

After pressing enter, you should see a message saying “The default username and password is…” followed by the username (‘user’) and your password, as per the screenshot below.

---

Two relatively quick and easy options for finding your WordPress password there (depending on whether or not you already had an SSH connection setup).

If you found this helpful or you have any questions, leave a comment below.