Login

In this article you can learn the various ways of customizing the Umbraco backoffice login screen and form.

To access the backoffice, you will need to login. You can do this by adding /umbraco at the end of your website URL, for example http://mywebsite.com/umbraco.

You will be presented with a login form similar to this:

Login screen

The login screen contains a Greeting, Email, Password field and optionally a Forgotten password link

Below, you will find instructions on how to customize the login screen.

Greeting

The login screen features a greeting which you can personalize by overriding the existing language translation keys. To do this, create a 'user' translation file for the default language of your Umbraco site, (usually en-US) to override the greetings. For en-US, you'd create a file called: en_us.user.xml in the directory ~/config/lang/. Then take the relevant keys (listed below) and add them to your ~/config/lang/en_us.user.xml file, and update the greetings as necessary.

Note: the config directory needs to be in the root of your project (not the wwwroot).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<language culture="en-US">
	<area alias="login">
		<key alias="greeting0">Happy super Sunday</key>
		<key alias="greeting1">Happy manic Monday</key>
		<key alias="greeting2">Happy tubular Tuesday</key>
		<key alias="greeting3">Happy wonderful Wednesday</key>
		<key alias="greeting4">Happy thunderous Thursday</key>
		<key alias="greeting5">Happy funky Friday</key>
		<key alias="greeting6">Happy Caturday</key>
	</area>
</language>

• Before the changes takes place you will need to restart the site.

You can customize other text on the login screen as well. First, grab the default values and keys from the en_us.xml in the Umbraco CMS Github repository. Thereafter copy the ones you want to translate into ~/config/lang/en_us.user.xml file.

Password reset

The Forgotten password? link allows your backoffice users to reset their password. To use this feature, you will need to add the following key to the Umbraco.Cms.Security section in the appsettings.json file:

"Umbraco": {
    "CMS": {
      "Security": {
        "AllowPasswordReset": true
      }
   }
}

Set it to true to enable the password reset feature, and false to disable the feature.

You will also need to configure a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server in your appsettings.json file. When you get a successful result on the SMTP configuration when running a health check in the backoffice, you are good to go!

An example:

"Umbraco": {
    "CMS": {
      "Global": {
        "Id": "xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx",
        "Smtp": {
          "From": "[e-mail]",
          "Host": "127.0.0.1",
          "Username": "username",
          "Password": "password"
        }
      }
    }
}

Custom background image and logo

It is possible to customize the background image and the logo for the backoffice login screen by adding the "Content" section in the appsettings.json file:

"Umbraco": {
    "CMS": {
      "Content": {
        "LoginBackgroundImage": "../myImagesFolder/myLogin.jpg",
        "LoginLogoImage": "../myImagesFolder/myLogo.svg",
        "LoginLogoImageAlternative": "../myImagesFolder/myLogo.svg"
      }
   }
}

The LoginBackgroundImage, LoginLogoImage, and LoginLogoImageAlternative are referenced from the /wwwroot/umbraco/ folder.

The LoginLogoImage is displayed on top of the LoginBackgroundImage and the LoginLogoImageAlternative is displayed when the LoginLogoImage is not available, for example on small resolutions.

Custom CSS

You can also customize the login screen by adding a custom CSS file. To do this, you will need to add a new file inside the ~/App_Plugins folder, for example ~/App_Plugins/MyCustomLoginScreen/my-custom-login-screen.css.

You can then add your custom CSS to the file:

:root {
    --umb-login-curves-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1);
}

This will change the color of the SVG graphics (curves) shown on the login screen. You can also hide the curves by adding the following CSS:

:root {
    --umb-login-curves-display: none;
}

Load the custom CSS file

To tell Umbraco about your custom CSS file, you will need to add a package.manifest file. The package.manifest file should look like this:

{
  "css": [
    "~/App_Plugins/MyCustomLoginScreen/my-custom-login-screen.css"
  ],
  "bundleOptions": "None"
}

Custom CSS properties reference

The following CSS properties are available for customization:

CSS Property	Description	Default Value
--umb-login-background	The background of the layout	#f4f4f4
--umb-login-primary-color	The color of the headline	#283a97
--umb-login-text-color	The color of the text	#000
--umb-login-header-font-size	The font-size of the headline	3rem
--umb-login-header-font-size-large	The font-size of the headline on large screens	4rem
--umb-login-header-secondary-font-size	The font-size of the secondary headline	2.4rem
--umb-login-image	The background of the image wrapper	The value of the LoginBackgroundImage setting
--umb-login-image-display	The display of the image wrapper	flex
--umb-login-image-border-radius	The border-radius of the image wrapper	38px
--umb-login-content-background	The background of the content wrapper	none
--umb-login-content-display	The display of the content wrapper	flex
--umb-login-content-width	The width of the content wrapper	100%
--umb-login-content-height	The height of the content wrapper	100%
--umb-login-content-border-radius	The border-radius of the content wrapper	0
--umb-login-align-items	The align-items of the main wrapper	unset
--umb-login-button-border-radius	The border-radius of the buttons	45px
--umb-login-curves-color	The color of the curves	#f5c1bc
--umb-login-curves-display	The display of the curves	inline

The CSS custom properties may change in future versions of Umbraco. You can always find the latest values in the login layout element in the Umbraco CMS Github repository.