Kill process running on specific ports in Ubuntu and windows | Fix error “Address already in use”

Developers often face errors related to ports that are already in use on their local machines. A common error is “Address already in use (EADDRINUSE).” As beginners are not usually aware of system commands to find and kill ports, this can become difficult and lead to unnecessary frustration.

It is generally fixed in 2 ways.
Start your server on a different port. Or
Free the port by killing the process associated with it.

How to kill ports in Ubuntu

Use the below command to find process ID associated with the port.

lsof -ti :$PORT

Now kill the process ID that you obtain by running above command.

kill $(lsof -ti :$PORT)

There might be some scenarios where you have to pass SIGKILL signal to stop and kill the process immediately. Use below command.

kill -9 $(lsof -ti :$PORT)

If you have enough permission to execute above commands, please use sudo like below.

sudo kill -9 $(lsof -ti :$PORT)

Note : Replace $PORT with the port number.

How to kill ports in Windows

1. Go to start and open the terminal in administrator mode.
2. Run this netstat command to find what service or process is running on the desired port. Use below command.

netstat -ano | findstr $PORT

You must be getting the process ID by running above command. Now kill the process using following command.

taskkill /F /pid $PID

Note : $PID is process ID

Hope it helps developers in killing ports quickly. Thanks for reading this article. If you have any other ways of killing ports, please add them in the comments and I will update the article as per feedback.

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Lakin Mohapatra is Writing technical articles, tweeting for empowering developers

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