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Users & login

First login

On first startup, if no admin account exists yet, DisplayHive creates one automatically:

  • Username: admin (or the value of ADMIN_BOOTSTRAP_USERNAME, if set).
  • Password: either a fixed value from ADMIN_BOOTSTRAP_PASSWORD, or a random password generated and printed once to the server logs.

Check your server logs after the first deploy to find this initial password, log in at /admin/, and set a real password for day-to-day use.

Sessions use a JSON Web Token, valid for 12 hours; you'll be asked to log in again once it expires. Repeated failed login attempts from the same IP/username are rate-limited and temporarily locked out.

Managing accounts

Additional admin accounts can be created, deactivated, reactivated, or deleted from the Accounts tab on the Users page (/users).

Rights & groups

Access isn't all-or-nothing: what an account can see and do is controlled by rights — one per checkable action (e.g. media.upload, screens.page, content.edit) — granted through groups, managed on the Groups tab of the same page.

  • A group holds a set of granted rights and can be nested under a parent group (subgroups inherit everything their ancestors grant).
  • A user can belong to multiple groups; the rights available to them are the union of everything those groups (and their ancestor groups) grant.
  • An account can also get a per-user override for an individual right — either allow (grants it regardless of group membership) or deny (blocks it no matter what any group grants). With no override, the right is simply inherited from group membership.
  • The built-in Superadmin group always grants every right — including ones added in future updates — and can't be edited away from that. Use it for accounts that should always have full access; put everyone else in narrower groups.

An account without users.page/rights access won't see the Users page at all, and every other page/action across the admin panel is gated the same way, down to individual buttons (e.g. a user might be able to view Media but not delete it).