Node / Express: EADDRINUSE, Address already in use - how can I stop the process using the port?

First, you would want to know which process is using port 3000

sudo lsof -i :3000

this will list all PID listening on this port, once you have the PID you can terminate it with the following:

kill -9 <PID>

where you replace <PID> by the process ID, or the list of process IDs, the previous command output.

You can also go the command line route:

ps aux | grep node

to get the process ids.

Then:

kill -9 PID

Doing the -9 on kill sends a SIGKILL (instead of a SIGTERM). SIGTERM has been ignored by node for me sometimes.

I hit this on my laptop running win8. this worked.

Run cmd.exe as 'Administrator':

C:\Windows\System32>taskkill /F /IM node.exe
SUCCESS: The process "node.exe" with PID 11008 has been terminated.

Check the PID i.e. id of process running on port 3000 with below command :

lsof -i tcp:3000

It would output something like following:

COMMAND  PID   USER   FD   TYPE  DEVICE  SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
node     5805  xyz    12u  IPv6  63135    0t0     TCP  *:3000 (LISTEN)

Now kill the process using :

kill -9 5805

For macOS Monterey(12.0):

Apple introduced some changes for AirPlay on macOS Monterey. Now, it uses 5000 and 7000 ports. If you are using these ports in your project, you need to disable this feature.

System Preferences > Sharing > untick AirPlay Receiver

For macOS Ventura(13.0) and above users:

System Settings > General > disable AirPlay Receiver

I found this solution, try it Give permission use sudo

  sudo pkill node

I usually use

npx kill-port 3000

or on my mac.

killall node

Rewriting @Gerard 's comment in my answer:

Try pkill nodejs or pkill node if on UNIX-like OS.

This will kill the process running the node server running on any port. Worked for me.

Linux

Run ps and determine the PID of your node process.

Then, run sudo kill PID

Windows

Use tasklist to display the list of running processes:

tasklist /O

Then, kill the node process like so (using the PID obtained from the tasklist command):

taskkill /pid PID

For windows open Task Manager and find node.exe processes. Kill all of them with End Task.

Here is a one liner (replace 3000 with a port or a config variable):

kill $(lsof -t -i:3000)

Windows by Cmd

1/2. search => write cmd => open node.js command prompt

2/2. Run windows command: taskkill

Ends one or more tasks or processes.

taskkill /f /im node.exe

/f - force ended

/im - Specifies the image name of the process to be terminated.

node.exe - executable file

Windows - Mannualy by Task Manager

This command is the same as going to Task Manager under the details tab & select node tasks (Tidy in my opinion).

And end task

Visual studio

Sometimes there is more than one terminal/task (client/server and so on). Select and close by ctrl + c.

I was getting this error once and took many of the approaches here.

My issues was that I had two app.listen(3000); calls in the same app.js script. The first app.listen() succeeded where the second threw the error.

Another useful command I came across that helped me debug was sudo fuser -k 3000/tcp which will kill any rogue processes you might have started (some processes may restart, e.g. if run with forever.js, but it was useful for me).

For Visual Studio Noobs like me

You may be running the process in other terminals!

After closing the terminal in Visual Studio, the terminal just disappears.

I manually created a new one thinking that the previous one was destroyed. In reality, every time I was clicking on New Terminal I was actually creating a new one on top of the previous ones.

So I located the first terminal and... Voila, I was running the server there.

Really simply for all OS's ..

npx kill-port 3000

Although your problem is as mentioned above you need to catch the different ways node can exit for example

process.on('uncaughtException', (err, origin) => {
    console.log(err);
});

// insert other handlers.

You may run into scenarios where even killing the thread or process won't actually terminate the app (this happens for me on Linux and Windows every once in a while). Sometimes you might already have an instance running that you didn't close.

As a result of those kinds of circumstances, I prefer to add to my package.json:

"scripts": {
    "stop-win": "Taskkill /IM node.exe /F",
    "stop-linux": "killall node"
},

I can then call them using:

npm run stop-win
npm run stop-Linux

You can get fancier and make those BIN commands with an argument flag if you want. You can also add those as commands to be executed within a try-catch clause.

FYI, you can kill the process in one command sudo fuser -k 3000/tcp. This can be done for all other ports like 8000, 8080 or 9000 which are commonly used for development.

ps aux | grep node
kill -9 [PID] (provided by above command)

Description:

1. ps will give the process status, aux provide the list of a: all users processes, u: user own processes, x: all other processes not attached to terminal.
2. pipe symbol: | will pass the result of ps aux to manipulate further.
3. grep will search the string provided(node in our case) from the list provided by ps aux.

PowerShell users:

Taskkill /IM node.exe /F

First find out what is running using:

sudo lsof -nP -i4TCP:3000 | grep LISTEN

You will get something like:

php-fpm 110 root    6u  IPv4 0x110e2ba1cc64b26d      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:3000 (LISTEN)
php-fpm 274 _www    0u  IPv4 0x110e2ba1cc64b26d      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:3000 (LISTEN)
php-fpm 275 _www    0u  IPv4 0x110e2ba1cc64b26d      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:3000 (LISTEN)

Then you can kill the process as followed:

sudo kill 110

Then you will be able to run without getting the listen EADDRINUSE :::3000 errors

bash$ sudo netstat -ltnp | grep -w ':3000'
 - tcp6    0      0 :::4000      :::*        LISTEN      31157/node      

bash$ kill 31157

UI solution For Windows users: I found that the top answers did not work for me, they seemed to be commands for Mac or Linux users. I found a simple solution that didn't require any commands to remember: open Task Manager (ctrl+shift+esc). Look at background processes running. Find anything Node.js and end the task.

After I did this the issue went away for me. As stated in other answers it's background processes that are still running because an error was previously encountered and the regular exit/clean up functions didn't get called, so one way to kill them is to find the process in Task Manager and kill it there. If you ran the process from a terminal/powerShell you can usually use ctrl+c to kill it.

I'm using Windows 10 and I'm on the development of React Native project when I encountered this problem.

To solve this,

Type

npx kill-port portName

like in my case, it was

npx kill-port 8081

, and hit enter.

After that, run this command to check whether your port is empty or not.

adb reverse tcp:8081 tcp:8081

If port 8081 is still busy, it will pop-out to the terminal, otherwise, you're good to go to run npm start

Just in case check if you have added this line multiple times by mistake

app.listen(3000, function() {
  console.log('listening on 3000')
});

The above code is for express but just check if you are trying to use the same port twice in your code.

Task Manager (ctrl+alt+del) ->

Processes tab ->

select the "node.exe" process and hit "End Process"

On Windows, I was getting the following error:

EADDRINUSE: address already in use :::8081.

Followed these steps:

• Opened CMD as Admin
• Ran the folowing

command netstat -ano|findstr "PID :8081"

got the following processes:

killed it via:

taskkill /pid 43144 /f

On MAC you can do like this:

raghavkhunger@MacBook-Air ~ % lsof -i tcp:8081 COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME node 23722 username 24u IPv6 0xeed16d7ccfdd347 0t0 TCP *:sunproxyadmin (LISTEN)

username@MacBook-Air ~ % kill -9 23722

In windows users: open task manager and end task the nodejs.exe file, It works fine.

If you are a windows user just go to task manager and end all the task of node js

With due respect to all the answers in the form, I would like to add a point.

I found that when I terminate a node app on error using Ctrl + Z, the very next time when I try to open it got the same error EADDRINUSE.

When I use Ctrl + C to terminate a node app, the next time I opened it, it did without a hitch.

Changing the port number to something other than the one in error solved the issue.