How to terminate a process on a port using the command line

Zombie processes are usually a pain to figure out. More often than not, I end up googling about how to terminate a process on a port using the command line. It can be done using the activity monitor as well, but that is a time-consuming process.

There are ways of doing it using netstat and other methods which I kept fiddling through. But recently I discovered an npm package that is easy to remember and does the job pretty instantaneously. And since I am a JavaScript developer, this is a lifesaver instead of remembering terminal commands.

First, we need to install the “kill-port” package globally:

# yarn global add kill-port

And then:

# Kill processes on multiple ports
kill-port 8080 8000

Or, if you want to do it in one step without a global install:

npx kill-port 8080

And that is it. Let’s start nuking those zombie processes now.