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# How do I remove the default user?

> Learn how to remove the default user when running ClickHouse Server.

{frontMatter.description}

<h2 id="removing-the-default-user">
  Removing the default user
</h2>

<Note>
  This guide is not applicable to ClickHouse Cloud.
</Note>

In this guide, we're going to learn how to remove the `default` user from ClickHouse Server.

We can do this by creating a YAML file (let's call it `remove_default_user.yaml`) that has the following content

```yaml theme={null}
users:
  default:
    "@remove": remove
```

The location of this file depends on how we have ClickHouse installed.

<h2 id="running-the-executable-directly">
  Running the executable directly
</h2>

If we're running the ClickHouse directly (`clickhouse server`), we need to put the file under the `config.d` directory.

When we run ClickHouse Server:

```
clickhouse server
```

We'll see the following line in the logs:

```
{} <Debug> ConfigProcessor: Merging configuration file 'config.d/remove_default_user.yaml'.
```

And we'll be unable to connect using `clickhouse client`:

```
ClickHouse client version 24.11.1.2557 (official build).
Connecting to localhost:9000 as user default.
Password for user (default):
Connecting to localhost:9000 as user default.
Code: 516. DB::Exception: Received from localhost:9000. DB::Exception: default: Authentication failed: password is incorrect, or there is no user with such name.
```

<h2 id="docker-or-installed">
  Docker or installed
</h2>

If we're running ClickHouse via Docker or have it installed on our machine, we need to put the file under the `/etc/clickhouse-server/users.d` directory instead.

So if we're running with Docker, we can mount the `config.d` directory that we created earlier to `/etc/clickhouse-server/users.d`:

```bash theme={null}
docker run \
  -v ./config.d:/etc/clickhouse-server/users.d \
  -p 8123:8123 -p9000:9000 \
  clickhouse/clickhouse-server:24.12
```

```
Merging configuration file '/etc/clickhouse-server/config.d/docker_related_config.xml'.
Logging trace to /var/log/clickhouse-server/clickhouse-server.log
Logging errors to /var/log/clickhouse-server/clickhouse-server.err.log
```

We can then search the server logs to check that it gets picked up:

```bash theme={null}
docker ps --format "table {{.ID}}\t{{.Image}}\t{{.Names}}\t{{.Command}}"
```

```text theme={null}
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                                NAMES               COMMAND
383e8ed89431   clickhouse/clickhouse-server:24.12   trusting_rosalind   "/entrypoint.sh"
```

```
docker exec -it trusting_rosalind grep "users\.d" /var/log/clickhouse-server/clickhouse-server.log
```

We should see the following line:

```text theme={null}
{} <Debug> ConfigProcessor: Merging configuration file '/etc/clickhouse-server/users.d/remove_default_user.yaml'.
```