Use lsof and ps to Find Running Services

11/11/2019

Sometimes when attempting to run a NodeJS server locally, you may see an error with:

Error: listen EADDRINUSE: address already i use 127.0.0.1:4567

To determine what's listening on this port (and potentially stop it), you can use a combination of the lsof and ps commands.

First, use lsof -P -i :<PORT> replacing <PORT> with the port you want to check.

We use the -P with lsof since we likely don't need the mapping for the port to a name in the network files¹.

Take the PID from lsof and run ps <PID> to find what's running on this port. If it's okay to kill it, run kill <PID> and try to re-run your command again.

By using lsof -P, it ignores the host machines conversion of port numbers to port names for network files. For example, if we ran lsof without -P, the NAME column would contain services that run on those ports, such as port 4567 for bcm-reporting or 4568 for tram. If you're interested in seeing what service MacOS expects to be serving on a specific port, you can run the following command and replace 4567 with the port you're curious about: cat /etc/services | grep " 4567/tcp". ↩

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