I’m looking for some help, please. I am new to Kinsta and very new to DevKinsta. In fact, I’ve only just installed it along with Docker. The first time I tried to import a site from my Kinsta account, I get the following error.
After Google searching and using AI to try to diagnose, I have tried deleting containers, volumes, config files, deleting both apps and reinstalling. I even tried a few terminal commands offered from Gemini. Nothing seems to work.
I’m simply trying to import my first staging site from Kinsta.
Does anybody have a sure-fire way to get Kinsta to actually download a site and make it work please?
I’m sorry to hear that you’re experiencing issues with our DevKinsta app. To help us investigate the problem further, could you please send me a private message with the DevKinsta main.log file?
For Mac users, you can typically find the log file at the following location: /Users/<yourusername>/Library/Logs/DevKinsta/main.log.
We have had this type of cases and I have devised a solution and posted here:
Please arm yourself with patience and be sure to understand and execute each step as written. I myself had to do it over a couple of times when I had the issue, but I hope you’ll have a better luck
Thanks for the reply Vladimir. But a brand-new software install on a standard Mac shouldn’t require this much troubleshooting just to do its basic job. I will follow these steps and see what happens. I know its not your fault, so no blame or criticism of you personally intended, its just really disappointing that this software is so poor.
OK, so I followed all steps perfectly. After completing all steps in part one, I still have the issue. So I moved on to steps covered in section 2 like advised, and I got this:
root@127f281ca05b:/# mysql -u root -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MariaDB monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MariaDB connection id is 6
Server version: 10.5.17-MariaDB-1:10.5.17+maria~ubu2004 mariadb.org binary distribution
Copyright (c) 2000, 2018, Oracle, MariaDB Corporation Ab and others.
Type ‘help;’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the current input statement.
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO ‘root’@‘%’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘root’ WITH GRANT OPTION;
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user ‘root’@‘localhost’ (using password: YES)
Then I went into config.json and changed the password manually in there.
I still have the error on importing and creating sites.
See if you can spot the difference, please copy the line to a text editor tool and make sure that quotes are replaced with proper quotes.
Wrong: GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON . TO ‘root’@‘%’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘xxxxxxx’ WITH GRANT OPTION;
Correct:
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'root'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'xxxxxxx' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Hi - I’m having the same problem as others on this thread. I’ve tried following the detailed instructions provided by @VladimirM including the final third step of modifying DevKinsta’s config.json file, but am still getting the same “Something bad happened” error on trying to import a site from my Kinsta account. Would love some help resolving this.
We appreciate you sharing the log file with our team! After reviewing the main.log file it appears the issue is that the connection to the database is still failing with an access denied error. This can be seen in the snippet below:
[2026-06-04 16:39:18.920] [error] Error - DK0051: DELETE_SITE_DATABASE: Error (1): UERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user ‘root’@‘localhost’ (using password: YES)
This is indicating that the root password for the MariaDB container/service is still out of sync.
To determine if the password still differs from what is in the config.json file please try running the following command in a Terminal window:
docker inspect devkinsta_db --format ‘{{range .Mounts}}{{.Name}} → {{.Destination}}{{println}}{{end}}’ docker exec -it devkinsta_db mysql -u root -e “SHOW DATABASES; SELECT User,Host,plugin FROM mysql.user WHERE User=‘root’;” grep -i password ~/Library/Application\ Support/DevKinsta/config.json
If this shows database information than this indicates that the data-dir password may differ from what is set in config.json.
To correct this you may run the following commands:
docker exec -it devkinsta_db mysql -u root
At the MariaDB prompt, with PASS replaced by the exact value from config.json. This password value should have been output at the end of the docker command above. These commands should be run individually with each one ending with the semicolon:
ALTER USER ‘root’@‘localhost’ IDENTIFIED VIA mysql_native_password USING PASSWORD(‘PASS’); GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON . TO ‘root’@‘%’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘PASS’ WITH GRANT OPTION; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; exit
After this has been completed please try importing your site again into DevKinsta to see if it can now be imported successfully.
If you do continue to experience any issue or have questions please don’t hesitate to let us know. We are standing by and happy to help!
Hi @Andrew - on running the first command I got an access denied error message from the database.
The next command you provided: docker exec -it devkinsta_db mysql -u root
also returns the following error message: Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)
Thank you for your reply! I’m sorry to hear that you ran into the access denied error when trying to run these commands as well.
In that case please try modifying the docker exec -it devkinsta_db mysql -u rootso that it is docker exec -it devkinsta_db mysql -u root -p. This should then result in you being prompted for a password. Please try copying/pasting the password from the ~/Library/Application\ Support/DevKinsta/config.json file into that prompt. Then, confirm if it allows you to connect to the database and if you see the MariaDB prompt.
If you continue to see an access denied error using that password that does confirm the password in the config.json file is out of sync with the database service. In that case we may need to recreate the MariaDB container and volume, or possibly the entire DevKinsta stack in Docker.
Please let us know however if using the password in the config.json file works first to confirm if the issue is indeed the passwords being out of sync there or not.
I ran docker exec -it devkinsta_db mysql -u root -p and then entered the password from the config.json file and it did allow me to connect with the database (no access denied error message). What’s the next step?
