# Injecting the administrator password

Compute can generate a random administrator (root) password and inject that password into an instance. If this feature is enabled, users can run ssh to an instance without an ssh keypair. The random password appears in the output of the openstack server create command. You can also view and set the admin password from the dashboard.

Password injection using the dashboard

For password injection display in the dashboard, please refer to the setting of `can_set_password` in Horizon doc

Password injection on libvirt-based hypervisors

For hypervisors that use the libvirt back end (such as KVM, QEMU, and LXC), admin password injection is disabled by default. To enable it, set this option in `/etc/nova/nova.conf`:

    [libvirt]
    inject_password=true

When enabled, Compute will modify the password of the admin account by editing the `/etc/shadow` file inside the virtual machine instance.

Note

Linux distribution guest only.

Note

Users can only use ssh to access the instance by using the admin password if the virtual machine image is a Linux distribution, and it has been configured to allow users to use ssh as the root user with password authorization. This is not the case for Ubuntu cloud images which, by default, does not allow users to use ssh to access the root account, or CentOS cloud images which, by default, does not allow ssh access to the instance with password.

Password injection and Windows images (all hypervisors)

For Windows virtual machines, configure the Windows image to retrieve the admin password on boot by installing an agent such as cloudbase-init.

this page last updated: 2026-04-21 19:00:00

Except where otherwise noted, this document is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. See all OpenStack Legal Documents.

found an error? report a bug