I recently faced a critical situation with a locally hosted Nexus 3 repository running in a Docker container, using the embedded OrientDB. The admin password had been lost. To make things worse, the disk filled up, taking the entire repository offline. We needed access restored fast.

I tried prompting an LLM for help, but most answers were generic or overly drastic, some even suggested reinstalling Nexus, which sounded overkill.

My first instinct was to try resetting the password by editing a config file or injecting a default password hash. But this approach quickly failed as I learned Nexus 3 stores all its configuration data inside the embedded OrientDB, so there’s no flat file on the host that you can edit, good for security.