Killing a Port on Mac: A Step-by-Step Guide

Pawan Kumar
3 min readMay 8, 2023

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Photo by Hendrik Kilimann on Unsplash

Apache Tomcat is an open-source Java Servlet Container that provides a web server for running Java web applications. It is developed and maintained by the Apache Software Foundation. Tomcat implements the Java Servlet and Java Server Pages (JSP) specifications, which allow developers to create dynamic web content using Java. Tomcat can be used standalone or integrated with web servers such as Apache HTTP Server. It is highly configurable and can be customised to meet specific deployment requirements. Tomcat is widely used in production environments for hosting Java web applications and is popular among developers due to its simplicity and lightweight footprint.

One of the common issues related to ports in Apache Tomcat is port conflict. Apache Tomcat uses default ports for running its server, such as port 8080 for HTTP, port 8443 for HTTPS, and port 8009 for AJP. If another application already uses these ports, it can cause conflicts and prevent Tomcat from starting or functioning correctly.

To resolve this issue, developers can stop the other application from using the conflicting ports or configure Tomcat to use a different port. This can be done by modifying the server.xml file in Tomcat’s configuration directory and changing the connector port numbers. However, developers should ensure that another application does not already use the new ports they choose.

To kill a port on Mac, we can follow these steps:

Open the Terminal application on your Mac. Type the following command to identify the process that is using the port:

lsof -i :<port_number>

Replace <port_number> with the actual port number you want to kill. This command will list the process ID (PID) of the application that is using the port.

Use the following command to kill the process:

kill <PID>

Replace <PID> with the process ID obtained from the previous command.

Alternatively, you can use the following command to kill the process that is using the port directly without identifying its PID:

sudo killall -9 <process_name>

Replace <process_name> with the name of the process that is using the port. This command will kill all instances of the process using that name. Note: Using the “-9” option will force the process to terminate immediately without allowing it to perform any cleanup operations, so use it cautiously.

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Also, to find and kill the Tomcat process with one command, use the following:

sudo kill -9 $(sudo lsof -t -i:8080) 

Replace “8080” with the actual port number used by Tomcat. This command finds the process ID using the lsof command and sends a signal to terminate it using the kill command with the “-9” option. Remember to use caution when terminating processes, as it can potentially cause data loss or other problems.

Happy Learning….

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