How to kill a process that is listening on a port in linux

"Error: Port 8080 is already in use. This means another process is already listening on the port you're trying to use and your service/application that you are trying to run won't be able to listen on that port. In Linux, sockets are considered as an combination of IP and port and each socket needs to be associated with a single process."

"In Linux, sockets are considered as an combination of IP and port and each socket needs to be associated with a single process. So, if there is a process that already made a bind system call on a specific port another process can't bind to that particular port until the other process gets terminated. In this article, we'll walk you through how to identify the process ID of the process that is using a specific port and how to gracefully kill it"

Port-in-use errors such as EADDRINUSE or "Port 8080 is already in use" occur when another process is already listening on the target IP:port, blocking a new service from binding. Linux treats sockets as an IP-and-port pair and allows only one process to bind a given socket at a time. If a process has performed a bind system call on a port, other processes cannot bind until that process stops. Resolve the issue by finding the process ID (PID) occupying the port and terminating it gracefully. Common commands for discovery and management include lsof, netstat, ss, and kill.

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