There are also two cli commands for this! ./nodebb user make admin <uid> for what you and Baris described - giving an existing user administrative privileges ./nodebb user reset <uid> to reset the password (<uid> will be 1 for default admin; the command will auto-generate a password and return it, you can also set your own with -p/--password option)

To be honest NodeBB shouldn't require the reverse proxy to pass the protocol in, I will have to take a closer look as to why that is needed.