EADDRINUSE again? This tool tells you who owns the port before you kill anything

port-reclaim finds the process holding a busy dev port, shows you what it is, reclaims it when it's obviously yours, asks when it isn't, and refuses when it would be a mistake.

Why this exists

Error: listen EADDRINUSE: address already in use :::3000

The reflex is lsof -i :3000 → read a PID → kill -9 it. Three things go wrong with that:

1. -9 skips graceful shutdown — anything mid-write to a socket, DB, or temp file gets truncated.
2. You're typing a number you read off a screen into a destructive command — TCP and UDP both appear, PIDs repeat, and fatigue picks the wrong one.
3. A PID is not a decision. "Something is on 3000" ≠ "that's the dev server you orphaned 40 minutes ago, not the Postgres."

The one check that fixes it

port-reclaim compares the working directory of the process with the directory you're standing in.

$ port-reclaim 3000 --list
Port 3000 is used by 'node' (PID 21836, '~/project', up 42m 11s) — matches the current directory.

$ port-reclaim 3000
Released port 3000 from node (PID 21836).

$ port-reclaim 5432
Port 5432 is used by 'postgres' (PID 3352, '~/dbdata', up 3h 12m). Kill it? (y/N)

What it refuses to touch

The refusals are the point. They exist because the easy version of this tool is 20 lines of shell.

Docker & the kernel are off-limits.
Port 8080 is used by 'docker-proxy' (PID 16004, …). Refusing to kill it — it appears to be a Docker process — stop the container instead (for example 'docker stop <container>').

Killing docker-proxy doesn't stop your container, it just leaves Compose in a worse state. PIDs 0–4 are protected on the same logic: System/HTTP.sys on Windows, systemd on Linux. --yes cannot override either.

Databases never die quietly. postgres, postmaster, mysqld, mariadbd, mongod, redis-server, memcached, etcd always confirm — even when running from inside your project, which is exactly the case a same-directory shortcut gets catastrophically wrong.

"I found nothing" is not "the port is free." When the owner is another user's or an elevated process, lsof returns nothing — and empty output looks identical to a free port. So the tool checks the answer by briefly binding the port:
Port 3000 is in use by a process port-reclaim cannot see — it may belong to another user, an elevated process, or a socket still closing.
It exits 1, so port-reclaim 3000 && next dev fails loudly instead of succeeding at nothing.

WSL2 tells the truth. Under default NAT networking, Linux and Windows have separate port spaces, so a Windows-held port looks free to every Linux tool — including this one until I tested it. It reaches across and says:
Port 4951 is free inside WSL, but a Windows tcp listener 'node.exe' (PID 19220) already holds it.
It reports rather than acts: a Windows PID passed to process.kill() would signal an unrelated Linux process.

Made for scripts

port-reclaim 3000 5173 8080      # several ports
port-reclaim --match '^node$'    # every port held by a matching process name
port-reclaim --json              # machine-readable, never terminates
port-reclaim                     # ports from config, no arguments

{ "port-reclaim": { "ports": [3000, 5173], "ignore": [5432] } }

A .reclaimignore file protects ports absolutely — that beats every heuristic. --list inspects without acting. Exit codes: 0 free or released, 1 still in use, 2 bad input. Colour turns itself off when output isn't a terminal (--no-color, NO_COLOR, FORCE_COLOR all respected — that's how the GIF above was recorded). There's a programmatic API too: discover, discoverListening, terminate, probe.

Fast, and measured

Whole-command wall clock on Windows 11 under Node 24, including Node's own startup, because that's the part people leave out of benchmarks:

The "before" was a bug: discovery started PowerShell three times per port, and a cold powershell.exe costs ~0.7s. Now netstat decides whether anything is on the port, and PowerShell starts at most once, to name the processes actually found.

The honest limits

• Not a process manager or supervisor, and no substitute for docker compose down.
• UDP matching is a heuristic — a UDP socket on a port can belong to a client, not a server.
• The free-port check binds momentarily, so a connection arriving in that instant can read as "in use". A race, not a flaw I'll paper over.
• It can't see other users' processes without your own elevated privileges.
• 0.x, one maintainer, ~52 tests across macOS/Linux/Windows × Node 18/20/22/24. The programmatic API may still move — read the changelog before upgrading.

Five real bugs are documented in that changelog — a taskkill missing /F that reported success while the port stayed busy, a PowerShell cmdlet name that never existed, an uptime calculation always negative on Windows, process names silently wrong on macOS and Node 24 (which quietly disabled the protections above), and a WSL check that once blamed WSL's own relay process. All five are now covered by tests that bind a real socket and make the tool find it through the actual OS.

Get it

npx port-reclaim 3000
# or
npm install --global port-reclaim

npm → port-reclaim · source → princegoel0/port-reclaim

If it saves you one bad kill -9, it did its job. OS quirks I haven't hit are exactly what I want an issue about.