How do I turn off the mysql password validation?

Question

It seems that I may have inadvertently loaded the password validation plugin in MySQL 5.7. This plugin seems to force all passwords to comply to certain rules.

I would l

Answer 1

Further to the answer from ktbos:

I modified the mysqld.cnf file and mysql failed to start. It turned out that I was modifying the wrong file!

So be sure the file you modify contains segment tags like [mysqld_safe] and [mysqld]. Under the latter I did as suggested and added the line:

validate_password_policy=LOW

This worked perfectly to resolve my issue of not requiring special characters within the password.