reCAPTCHA Enterprise has locked me out of my website

Question

I'm learning how to create a Moodle, which is an LMS. So, my website is a Moodle one. The Moodle software already had it set up to include the option of using reCAPTCHA, so I created a key and input in the information it was asking for, both the public and the secret key. I went to test it out, and the result is that at first it said "Error for site owner: invalid key type."

So I googled why I might have gotten that message. The main thing that came up was that I needed to disable domain verification by making sure the toggle was turned off. So, I went back to my key page, and checked, and it was already turned off by default as far as I could tell. I refreshed, and it was not fixed. So, then I wondered if it was because I put in the main website URL instead of the login page sub-domain. I went back and tried that. It would not let me put the subdomain in. So, I returned it to the main domain name. Going back and forth, trying to figure it out, I decided I needed to turn off the authentication that allowed reCAPTCHA on my website, and that should fix it, right? Nope! It is still there! Worse, now my Moodle website has locked me out and every time I try to login, it tells me that authentication has failed. It has locked me out of my website! I don't know what I did wrong to begin with, and now I'm really stuck! The only thing I can think to do is maybe delete the key... but I'm afraid if I do that, I might be permanently stuck without a solution. If I need access to the key to fix things on my website end of things and it is deleted, then I can't access it. And since turning off the reCAPTCHA function on my website did not take it off my login page, I am at a loss.

Answer 1

If you are locked out, you can temporarily set the authentication to manual only by editing config.php and inserting this line

$CFG->auth='manual';

If you have forgotten the admin password, then you can change it via the command line

php admin/cli/reset_password.php 

You can also temporarily disable recaptcha by setting the keys to empty in config.php

$CFG->recaptchapublickey = '';
$CFG->recaptchaprivatekey = '';

The existing settings in the database should still be intact, but just in case - make a note of the existing values before changing config.php

php admin/cli/cfg.php --name=auth

php admin/cli/cfg.php --name=recaptchapublickey

php admin/cli/cfg.php --name=recaptchaprivatekey