I installed ColdFusion 2021 via the GUI before but not via the command line.  So while reading Mark’s excellent article “CLI Installation of ColdFusion for lower memory use“, I decided to follow along and do an install using this method.  The instructions there are very easy to follow and I got the server up with no issues.  When I went to the administrator though I noticed the username was “admin”.  One of the things I remember from Pete Freitag’s lockdown guides is that you don’t want to use the default username. Read the 2021 CF Lockdown Guide version here.  Maybe I missed it in the install but I don’t remember being asked to set the username via the CLI method.

I poked around in the administrator but did not see anywhere I could update the username.  Updating the password I found easily but nowhere to update the username itself.  I Googled around and found instructions to update the username for past versions but not really for 2021.  The good news is that those instructions for older CF installs still work for the new version.  You can read the documentation for changing the password from all the way back in ColdFusion 8 which is the first result I found explaining how to do this.

Here’s the Cliff Notes, straight from that article above.

• Stop the ColdFusion server
• Back up the neo-security.xml file found here {cf_root}libneo-security.xml
• Open neo-security.xml and find the admin.userid.root entry.
• Replace the default string value admin with the desired username.
• Save the file.
• Start the ColdFusion server

So the more things change, the more some stay the same.  And maybe now if someone searches for how to do this they will find this post for ColdFusion 2021 and not see such an old post as the first result out there.