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Kill process using port in Windows

Kill process using port in Windows

David Y.

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The Problem

On Windows, how can I find which process is listening on a given port and kill it? For example, I want to find and kill the process listening on localhost:8080.

The Solution

We can do this using the Windows command line. Run cmd.exe as an administrator and enter the following command:

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netstat -ano | findstr :8080

In the first part of this command, we invoke netstat, a utility for viewing network connections.

  • -a shows all connections and listening ports.
  • -n shows IP addresses and port numbers numerically.
  • -o shows the process ID for each connection or listening port.

This will show all current TCP connections on our system. In the second part of the command, we pipe this output into findstr to find and display the line showing information about the process listening on TCP port 8080. Our output should resemble the following:

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    TCP     0.0.0.0:8080    0.0.0.0:0   LISTENING   2660
    TCP     [::]:8080       [::]:0      LISTENING   2660

The final number on both lines is the process ID (PID) of the process using port 8080. Using this PID, we can end the process with taskkill:

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taskkill /PID 2660 /F

The /PID flag indicates that we’re locating the task to kill by PID, and the /F flag will forcefully end the task. After running this command, we should see the following output:

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SUCCESS: The process with PID 2660 has been terminated.

If we rerun the netstat command above, we should now get empty output.

A quicker way to do this, with only a single command, is to use the NPM package kill-port. With NPM installed, just run the following command:

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npx kill-port 8080
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