Hi,
Thanks for responding. I was evaluating phabricator on my Ubuntu machine. I was certain the UI user registration wont work because email wont be sent out. So I went to terminal and used ./accountadmin to create an admin user.

I faced the same issue too. As a user, after setting up a web UI why go back to terminal and type

./bin/auth recover <username>

and then come back to web UI to login? Once the setup is completed, a user would feel that the job is done and now he can login in peace.