Forgot your Uptime Kuma password? It takes one minute to fix

It happened to me recently: I wanted to set up Uptime Kuma alerts and couldn’t remember the password. That’s what happens when you set something up and don’t log in again for weeks.

Good news: you don’t need to reinstall anything or lose your monitors. Uptime Kuma ships with a tool to reset it.

If it runs in Docker

From the machine running the container:

docker exec -it uptime-kuma npm run reset-password

• uptime-kuma is the container name. If yours is different, check with docker ps.
• It asks for the new password twice. Nothing shows while you type: that’s normal.
• It changes the password of the existing user. It doesn’t create a new one.

Then log into the web UI with your usual username and the new password.

If you do it from another computer over SSH

Here’s the catch. If you run the command like this:

ssh pi@192.168.1.50 docker exec -it uptime-kuma npm run reset-password

it fails with something like “the input device is not a TTY”. The tool needs an interactive terminal to ask for the password, and SSH doesn’t open one when you pass it a command directly.

The fix is adding -t to ssh:

ssh -t pi@192.168.1.50 docker exec -it uptime-kuma npm run reset-password

For the same reason, some terminals built into editors or AI assistants can’t do this for you: they don’t have an interactive terminal. Open it in a regular terminal (on Windows, the Terminal app).

If it doesn’t run in Docker

Go to the folder where you installed Uptime Kuma and run:

npm run reset-password

What if you don’t remember the username either?

Try the usual ones first (admin, your name). Otherwise, the username is in Uptime Kuma’s database, but at that point you’re touching sensitive data: make a copy before opening it.

So it doesn’t happen again

Store it in a password manager. I run one at home on the same Raspberry Pi, and that’s where all my home-service passwords live now. The password you don’t have to remember is the one you can’t forget.