How do I log in to the admin panel on a self-hosted Trilium?

[yume-real]

I installed Trilium on my VPS server, set up a shared root note (book) that opens first for every new visitor to the site, and it works by automatically redirecting from example.com/ to example.com/share. As a result, the next day I was logged out of my account, and since the admin panel used to open at example.com/, I can no longer access it. Question: how can I now get into the admin panel?

[dosubot[bot]]

Hi @yume-real! I'm Dosu and I’m helping the Trilium team.

Trilium itself does not redirect the root URL (/) to /share; this is almost certainly set up in your web server (like nginx or Apache) or a reverse proxy. The login page is always available at /login (for example, example.com/login) unless your web server is redirecting all traffic from / to /share.

To regain access to the admin panel, try going directly to /login. If you are still redirected, you need to update your web server configuration to allow /login (and possibly /setup) to be served by Trilium, not redirected to /share. There is no separate /admin URL—the main app interface after login is the admin panel.

If you want to temporarily disable authentication (not recommended for public servers), you can set noAuthentication=true in the [General] section of your config.ini file, which will let you in without a password source.

If login issues persist, check file permissions on your data/sessions folder, especially if you use Docker, as permission problems can prevent session creation and login source.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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[eliandoran]

and it works by automatically redirecting from example.com/ to example.com/share

How did you achieve that?

[EnBandit]

automatically redirecting from example.com/ to example.com/share

I encountered the same issue when trying to log into my Trilium server today. I recently disabled MFA to simplify the login process on my Apple devices, and that was the only setting I changed before the problem occurred. When I re-enabled MFA (by logging in through /login), the issue was resolved. However, I couldn’t immediately reproduce the problem by disabling MFA again—the issue had originally appeared about two days after I turned it off.

Prior to this, I attempted to restart Trilium and even rebooted my VPS, but neither of these actions resolved the problem.

set up a shared root note (book) that opens first for every new visitor to the site

I also set up a shared root note, and use caddy as reverse proxy with config like this:

I double-checked Caddy and its configuration to ensure it wasn’t the cause (by reloading the configuration and restarting Caddy).

Maybe it's the MFA to blame? I'll add more information if I find further evidence.

[EnBandit]

@eliandoran, it occured when turned off MFA.
ver: 0.98.1 Build revision:7cbff47078012e32279c110c49b904bd24dcecb3

[EnBandit]

or maybe it is the cause?

[eliandoran]

@EnBandit , most certainly. Checking Redirect bare domain to Share page would go to your share notes instead of logging in. You'd explicitly have to go to /login.

Did you intentionally or accidentally turn on this option?

[EnBandit]

@eliandoran, I remember seeing this option in the settings when I was exploring new features after updating Trilium weeks ago, though I’m not sure whether I enabled it or not.

Anyway, it’s strange that when MFA is turned on, the “Redirect bare domain to Share page” feature doesn’t seem to work. I just double-checked this behavior. So that might explain why I couldn’t log in via the bare domain after I disabled MFA.

I tried to find out the related code, but stopped at here:

I think it might be a bug?