steal-port

A CLI tool that kills whatever process is using a port. Reads from .env.local or .env files, or accepts a port via argument.

Usage

# Kill process on port from .env.local (or .env fallback)
steal-port

# Kill process on explicit port
steal-port 3000
steal-port --port 3000
steal-port -p 3000

How it works

1. If a port is provided via argument, use that
2. Otherwise, look for PORT= or VITE_PORT= in .env.local (current directory)
3. If not found, look for PORT= or VITE_PORT= in .env (current directory)
4. If no port found anywhere, exit with error
5. Find and kill any process using that port
6. Exit cleanly (exit 0) whether or not a process was killed

Note: PORT takes priority over VITE_PORT if both are defined.

Example package.json usage

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "steal-port && vite",
    "watch": "steal-port && nest start --watch"
  }
}