Adding a WordPress User via PHP

by Dave Mroz | Aug 29, 2020 | WordPress, Knowledge Base, Security

Occasionally it happens where we are inheriting a site developed by someone else where we have file system access, but not access to WordPress itself. When this occurs, we can use PHP to create a new WordPress administrator account to let us into WordPress to take full control of the site.

Here is a block of code that can be used to create a new WordPress administrator. Drop this into the functions.php file of the active theme and load the site. In the background it will execute and create a new administrator account with the credentials specified below. Edit the functions.php file again to remove this code so that it doesn’t execute each time the site is accessed.

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add_action( 'init', function () {

$username = 'tempadmin';

$password = 'astrongpassword';

$email_address = 'tempadmin@glimmernet.com';

if ( ! username_exists( $username ) ) {

$user_id = wp_create_user( $username, $password, $email_address );

$user = new WP_User( $user_id );

$user->set_role( 'administrator' );

}

} );

Please, use this code only for good! 🙂

Note that if you have a security plugin such as Wordfence, you will receive a notification that a user was created outside of the WordPress installation. This is normal and can be ignored.

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