How to resolve “EADDRINUSE: address already in use” error

By Murari NayakTechnology
eaddrinuse

Mostly in development machines, we tend to leave out the node server running, and close the terminal. This keeps the node server running, and when we try to restart the application, it throws the “EADDRINUSE: address already in use” error.

Error: listen EADDRINUSE: address already in use :::8080
    at Server.setupListenHandle [as _listen2] (net.js:1258:14)
    at listenInCluster (net.js:1306:12)
    at Server.listen (net.js:1394:7)

This can be fixed by first finding out which PID the process is using and then kill it.

Please note that the following commands were run on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
For Windows or Mac, the process remains the same, while the commands might be a little different.
Will add them up when time permits.

Ubuntu

To find the PID,

lsof -i TCP:8080 | grep LISTEN

For me, the port that was in use was 8080. You can replace that with any port you want.

The result will show something like:

node    2464 murari   21u  IPv6 4392639      0t0  TCP *:http-alt

Note the second column of the result, which is the PID, and required to stop the running process.

kill -9 2464

2464 is the PID from the previous result, and running the above line will kill the process running on the given port.

Windows

You might need to open the CMD in Administrator mode

To find the PID

netstat -ano | findstr :8080

Result would be something like:

TCP   0.0.0.0:8080   0.0.0.0:0   LISTENING   4744

In windows, the last column referes to the PID, and can be used to forcefully terminate the process. To terminate, run

taskkill /PID 4744 /F

Confirm

You can check if the port has got free by running the first command again, and you should get no results, making sure that the EADDRINUSE EADDRINUSE error is resolved.

To be able to use multiple node versions on the system, we can use NVM (Node Version Manager). You can find more information on how to install NVM here.

Some additional commands

Check the history with the given command. Can be used without grep
history | grep some_command
Kill all the process with name 'conky'
kill -9 $(pidof conky)

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