stop all instances of node.js server

Question

Windows Machine:

Need to kill a Node.js server, and you don't have any other Node processes running, you can tell your machine to kill all processes named node.exe. That would look like this:

taskkill /im node.exe

And if the processes still persist, you can force the processes to terminate by adding the /f flag:

taskkill /f /im node.exe

If you need more fine-grained control and need to only kill a server that is running on a specific port, you can use netstat to find the process ID, then send a kill signal to it. So in your case, where the port is 8080, you could run the following:

C:\>netstat -ano | find "LISTENING" | find "8080"

The fifth column of the output is the process ID:

  TCP    0.0.0.0:8080           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       14828
  TCP    [::]:8080              [::]:0                 LISTENING       14828

You could then kill the process with taskkill /pid 14828. If the process refuses to exit, then just add the /f (force) parameter to the command.

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MacOS machine:

The process is almost identical. You could either kill all Node processes running on the machine:

killall node

Or also as alluded to in @jacob-groundwater's answer below using lsof, you can find the PID of a process listening on a port (pass the -i flag and the port to significantly speed this up):

$ lsof -Pi :8080
COMMAND   PID      USER   FD   TYPE             DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
node     1073    urname   22u  IPv6  bunchanumbershere      0t0  TCP *:8080 (LISTEN)

The process ID in this case is the number underneath the PID column, which you could then pass to the kill command:

$ kill 1073

If the process refuses to exit, then just use the -9 flag, which is a SIGTERM and cannot be ignored:

$ kill -9 1073

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Linux machine:

Again, the process is almost identical. You could either kill all Node processes running on the machine (use -$SIGNAL if SIGKILL is insufficient):

killall node

Or also using netstat, you can find the PID of a process listening on a port:

$ netstat -nlp | grep :8080
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:8080         0.0.0.0:*                   LISTEN      1073/node

The process ID in this case is the number before the process name in the sixth column, which you could then pass to the kill command:

$ kill 1073

If the process refuses to exit, then just use the -9 flag, which is a SIGTERM and cannot be ignored:

$ kill -9 1073

Works for Linux, OS X

killall node

You can use lsof get the process that has bound to the required port.

Unfortunately the flags seem to be different depending on system, but on Mac OS X you can run

lsof -Pi | grep LISTEN

For example, on my machine I get something like:

mongod     8662 jacob    6u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e0970fbe9      0t0  TCP localhost:27017 (LISTEN)
mongod     8662 jacob    7u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e0f9c24b1      0t0  TCP localhost:28017 (LISTEN)
memcached  8680 jacob   17u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e0971f7d1      0t0  TCP *:11211 (LISTEN)
memcached  8680 jacob   18u  IPv6 0x17ceae4e0bdf6479      0t0  TCP *:11211 (LISTEN)
mysqld     9394 jacob   10u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e080c4001      0t0  TCP *:3306 (LISTEN)
redis-ser 75429 jacob    4u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e1ba8ea59      0t0  TCP localhost:6379 (LISTEN)

The second number is the PID and the port they're listening to is on the right before "(LISTEN)". Find the rogue PID and kill -9 $PID to terminate with extreme prejudice.

Windows & GitBash Terminal I needed to use this command inside Windows / Webstorm / GitBash terminal

cmd "/C TASKKILL /IM node.exe /F"

if you want to kill a specific node process , you can go to command line route and type:

ps aux | grep node

to get a list of all node process ids. now you can get your process id(pid), then do:

kill -9 PID

and if you want to kill all node processes then do:

killall -9 node

-9 switch is like end task on windows. it will force the process to end. you can do:

kill -l

to see all switches of kill command and their comments.

Linux

To impress your friends

ps aux | grep -i node | awk '{print $2}' | xargs  kill -9

But this is the one you will remember

killall node