Terminate Process on a Port from Command Line

Once a week I have to deal with a zombie process or try to start a process that’s already running on its designated port. In most cases I use macOS’s Activity Monitor to kill the process, which is time-consuming. What if we could just kill a process on a given port from the command line? Well, we can!

To terminate a process on a given port, install kill-port and starting nuking those zombies via:

# yarn global add kill-port

# Kill processes on multiple ports
kill-port 6060 8000

If you want to programmatically kill a port that you want to ensure your app will run on, you can do that as well:

const kill = require('kill-port')

kill(6060, 'tcp')
      .then(console.log)
      .catch(console.log)

I look forward to incorporating this library into my Node.js sites so that I can clear the way for a given port and avoid zombie processes.