nukeport

A beautiful terminal GUI to inspect listening ports, see which project owns each one, kill processes, and monitor your system in real time.

nukeport gives you a real-software-feeling dashboard right in your terminal — no Electron, no browser. It scans every listening port, maps it to the owning process and the project directory it's running from, and lets you kill a stuck dev server with a single keystroke. A live panel on the side shows CPU, memory, network, load, uptime and battery.

It works on Windows, macOS and Linux.

┌ nukeport v1.0.1   12 ports   sort:Port   view:listening ───────── myhost · windows  20:14:31 ┐
│ Listening Ports ───────────────────────────────────┐ CPU 23% ───────────────────────────┐
│ Port    PID     Process       Project      CPU  Mem │     ╭╮     ╭─╮                       │
│ 3000    18244   node          my-next-app  1%   2%  │   ╭─╯╰─────╯ ╰──╮                    │
│ 5173    9921    node          vite-shop    0%   1%  │ ──╯              ╰───                │
│ 5432    3120    postgres      —            0%   3%  ├ Memory 41% ─────────────────────────┤
│ 8080    7765    java          api-gateway  4%   8%  │ ████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ │
│ ...                                                 ├ System ─────────────────────────────┤
├ Details ────────────────────────────────────────────│ Host: myhost   Cores: 16            │
│ node  PID 18244  port 3000 tcp/LISTEN                │ Mem: 6.5 GB / 16 GB                 │
│ Project: my-next-app                                 │ Net: ↓1.2 MB/s ↑320 KB/s            │
│ Location: C:\dev\my-next-app                         │ Up: 2d 4h 11m                       │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
  Enter/k kill  K force  f filter  s sort  a all/listen  o open dir  r refresh  ? help  q quit

Install

npm install -g nukeport

Then run:

nukeport      # launch the dashboard
nk            # short alias

Or use it without installing:

npx nukeport

Features

• Port → Process → Project mapping. See not just PID 18244, but node → my-next-app and the full path C:\dev\my-next-app. nukeport resolves the project by reading the process working directory and command line and walking up to the nearest package.json.
• One-keystroke kill. Select a row and press Enter (graceful) or Shift+K (force). Cross-platform: taskkill /T on Windows, SIGTERM/SIGKILL on Unix. Killing a process tree also stops its children.
• Live system monitor. CPU history chart, memory gauge, network throughput, load average, process count, uptime and battery — refreshing every 1.5s.
• Filter & sort. Press f to filter by port, PID, process name or project; press s to cycle the sort column.
• Open the project. Press o to open the owning project's folder in your OS file manager.
• Listening-only or everything. Press a to toggle between just listening sockets and all connections.
• Mouse support. Click rows, scroll the detail panel.

Keyboard shortcuts

| Key | Action | | --- | --- | | ↑ ↓ / j k | Move selection | | Enter / k | Kill selected process (graceful) | | Shift+K | Force kill (SIGKILL / taskkill /F) | | f or / | Filter | | s | Cycle sort column | | a | Toggle listening-only / all connections | | o | Open project directory | | r | Rescan now | | ? / h | Help overlay | | q / Esc / Ctrl+C | Quit |

Command line (no GUI)

nukeport also works headless for scripts and quick one-offs:

nukeport ls               # print a table of listening ports and exit
nukeport kill 3000        # kill whatever is listening on port 3000
nukeport kill 3000 -f     # force kill
nukeport kill 18244       # numbers that aren't a listening port are treated as PIDs
nukeport --help

How project detection works

For each listening port nukeport finds the owning PID, then tries — in order:

1. The process current working directory (/proc/<pid>/cwd on Linux, lsof on macOS).
2. The first real filesystem path found in the process command line (e.g. the script you ran).
3. The process executable path.

From that path it walks upward to the nearest package.json and reads its name. On Windows, reading another process's CWD requires elevated access, so detection there relies on the command line and executable path — which already covers the common node script.js / dev-server case.

Permissions

• Listing ports needs no special privileges.
• Killing a process you don't own may require running your terminal as Administrator (Windows) or with sudo (Unix). nukeport reports a clear error when permission is denied.

Requirements

• Node.js >= 16
• A terminal that supports ANSI / Unicode (Windows Terminal, iTerm2, most modern terminals)

License

MIT