Argthtjtr

This is my first time working with Node.js and I ran into this problem:

I have started a Node server through the plugin of an IDE. Unfortunately, I cannot use the IDE's terminal. So I tried to run the script from the command line.

This is the problem - I am using the Express module and my app is listening some port (8080). When I start the app from the command line, it throws this error:

events.js:71

    throw arguments[1]; // Unhandled 'error' event

                   ^

Error: listen EADDRINUSE

    at errnoException (net.js:770:11)

    at HTTPServer.Server._listen2 (net.js:910:14)

    at listen (net.js:937:10)

    at HTTPServer.Server.listen (net.js:986:5)

    at Object.<anonymous> (C:xampphtdocsnodechatapp.js:5:5)

    at Module._compile (module.js:449:26)

    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:467:10)

    at Module.load (module.js:356:32)

    at Function.Module._load (module.js:312:12)

    at Module.runMain (module.js:492:10)

Even though I am not very sure what this error could be I assumed that it's because the app is listening on a port which is already in use. So I did:

netstat -an

I can see

TCP    0.0.0.0:8080           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING

It's because the Node server is already started when I tried to start it from the IDE.

So I want to know, how can I stop all server instances? Also if you can tell me how to detect what's running on a port and kill it.

Windows Machine:

Need to kill a Node.js server, and you don't have any other Node processes running, you can tell your machine to kill all processes named node.exe. That would look like this:

taskkill /im node.exe

And if the processes still persist, you can force the processes to terminate by adding the /f flag:

taskkill /f /im node.exe

If you need more fine-grained control and need to only kill a server that is running on a specific port, you can use netstat to find the process ID, then send a kill signal to it. So in your case, where the port is 8080, you could run the following:

C:>netstat -ano | find "LISTENING" | find "8080"

The fifth column of the output is the process ID:

  TCP    0.0.0.0:8080           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       14828

  TCP    [::]:8080              [::]:0                 LISTENING       14828

You could then kill the process with taskkill /pid 14828. If the process refuses to exit, then just add the /f (force) parameter to the command.

Linux machine:

The process is almost identical. You could either kill all Node processes running on the machine (use -$SIGNAL if SIGKILL is insufficient):

killall node

Or also using netstat, you can find the PID of a process listening on a port:

$ netstat -nlp | grep :8080

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:8080         0.0.0.0:*                   LISTEN      1073/node

The process ID in this case is the number before the process name in the sixth column, which you could then pass to the kill command:

$ kill 1073

If the process refuses to exit, then just use the -9 flag, which is a SIGTERM and cannot be ignored:

$ kill -9 1073

The fastest way is

killall node

Works with Linux, OS X

You can use lsof get the process that has bound to the required port.

Unfortunately the flags seem to be different depending on system, but on Mac OS X you can run

lsof -Pi | grep LISTEN

For example, on my machine I get something like:

mongod     8662 jacob    6u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e0970fbe9      0t0  TCP localhost:27017 (LISTEN)

mongod     8662 jacob    7u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e0f9c24b1      0t0  TCP localhost:28017 (LISTEN)

memcached  8680 jacob   17u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e0971f7d1      0t0  TCP *:11211 (LISTEN)

memcached  8680 jacob   18u  IPv6 0x17ceae4e0bdf6479      0t0  TCP *:11211 (LISTEN)

mysqld     9394 jacob   10u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e080c4001      0t0  TCP *:3306 (LISTEN)

redis-ser 75429 jacob    4u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e1ba8ea59      0t0  TCP localhost:6379 (LISTEN)

The second number is the PID and the port they're listening to is on the right before "(LISTEN)". Find the rogue PID and kill -9 $PID to terminate with extreme prejudice.