portkill

Kill the process running on a given port — instantly, from any terminal.

Why

You're running a dev server, you close it wrong, and now port 3000 is stuck.
You paste into Google, copy-paste some lsof command, grep the PID, then kill it.

portkill does all of that in one command.

Usage

No install needed:

npx @naouts/portkill 3000

Or install globally:

npm install -g @naouts/portkill
portkill 3000

Output

→ Scanning port 3000...
  Found: node (PID 18423)
✔ Killed node (PID 18423)

Options

| Flag | Description | |------|-------------| | <port> | Port number to kill (1–65535) | | -h, --help | Show help | | -v, --version | Print version |

Platform support

| OS | Method used | |----|-------------| | Windows | netstat -ano + tasklist + taskkill /F | | macOS | lsof -ti + ps + kill -9 | | Linux | lsof -ti + ps + kill -9 |

Examples

# Kill whatever is on port 8080
npx @naouts/portkill 8080

# Kill a stuck Vite dev server
npx @naouts/portkill 5173

# Kill a Next.js server
npx @naouts/portkill 3000

If multiple processes share the port, all of them are killed.

Install globally

npm install -g @naouts/portkill

Then use anywhere:

portkill 3000

Permissions

On Linux/macOS, killing processes owned by another user requires sudo:

sudo portkill 80

On Windows, run your terminal as Administrator if you get an access denied error.

Requirements

• Node.js 14 or later
• No external dependencies — only Node.js built-ins

License

MIT © naouts