Lost access to your server

A reinstalled machine, a reset client, a broken single sign-on setup — and nobody left who can sign in as an admin. Every server has a way back in: a fresh single-use invite for its recovery account, admin.

On Nightship Cloud

In the app, open Add server, enter your server’s URL (https://yourstudio.nightship.cloud) and click Lost access… — it appears for Nightship Cloud addresses. It sends a recovery invite straight away; no admin has to approve it. (Request access… next to it is for team members: it asks your admin for an invite.) Without the app, use the Lost access form on the Cloud page.

The invite goes to the email address registered for the server (the one given at sign-up), is valid for 4 hours and can be used once. Redeem it with Join with invite… as in Join a server with an invite; you are signed in as admin. Asking again replaces the previous invite.

For your security the form never says whether a server exists, and a server name can only be asked for once every few minutes. No mail after a while? Check the spam folder, and whether the registered address is still yours — then write to info@nightship.io.

On a self-hosted server

Whoever has shell access to the server mints the invite, as the user that owns the data directory:

nightshipd invite create admin --hours 4 --data-dir /var/lib/nightship

It prints a single-use code; redeem it in the app with Join with invite…. The command works while the server is running. For the right data directory and user in Docker, on Windows and with systemd, see Bootstrap the first admin.

Why this always works

The user admin is the server’s recovery account: it can’t be deleted, disabled or demoted, so an invite for it always leads back in. If your server’s first admin was created under a different name, it has no recovery account — on a self-hosted server create one from the shell with nightshipd user create admin --role admin.

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