I have been using WSL for some time now. Having quick and easy access to a nix distribution is so handy in many ways. Not having to worry about managing VMs in a hypervisor makes the whole experience so much nicer. Today I switched back to a Ubuntu install I hadn’t used from quite a while and the first thing was to run sum updates but I had forgotten the password I had set.

This post covers the simple process to perform a password recovery of a WSL install.

1. Switch to root

First thing is to change the default user for the distribution. This can be done by editing the WSL distributions configuration with a simple command on the windows command line.

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PS C:\Users\user> ubuntu config --default-user root

Now when the distribution is launched we will be logged in as the root user.

2. Change the Password

Now that we have root access to the distribution we can change our password like you would with any linux distribution.

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user@box:~/$ passwd my-user
New password:

3. Restore the default user

Now that the password has been changed, don’t forget to restore the default user.

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PS C:\Users\user> ubuntu config --default-user my-user

That’s it! It’s really a quick and simple process and not to dissimilar to the process you would use if we were working with a physical of VM install of a Nix distribution.