how to release localhost from Error: listen EADDRINUSE

Question

i am testing a server written in nodejs on windows 7 and when i try to run the tester in the command line i get the following error

Error: listen EADDRINUSE
         


        

Answer 1

The aforementioned killall -9 node, suggested by Patrick works as expected and solves the problem but you may want to read the edit part of this very answer about why kill -9 may not be the best way to do it.

On top of that you might want to target a single process rather than blindly killing all active processes.

In that case, first get the process ID (PID) of the process running on that port (say 8888):

lsof -i tcp:8888

This will return something like:

COMMAND   PID    USER   FD   TYPE             DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
node     57385   You   11u  IPv6 0xac745b2749fd2be3      0t0  TCP *:ddi-tcp-1

(LISTEN) Then just do (ps - actually do not. Please keep reading below):

kill -9 57385

Answer 2

I have solved this issue by adding below in my package.json for killing active PORT - 4000 (in my case) Running on WSL2/Linux/Mac

"scripts": {
    "dev": "nodemon app.js",
    "predev":"fuser -k 4000/tcp && echo 'Terminated' || echo 'Nothing was running on the PORT'",
  }

Source

Answer 3

One possible solution that worked for me was simply to close the window in browser where I had the corresponding "http://localhost:3000/" script running.

Answer 4

To anyone who has tried all of the above, but still can't find the rouge process, try them all again but make sure you include "sudo" in front of the commands.

Answer 5

In window, please execute this command:

taskkill /F /PID 1952

Answer 6

If you like UI more, find the process Node.js in windows task manager and kill it.