Question

I want to start a server which listen to a port. I can specify port explicitly and it works. But I would like to find a port in an automatic way. In this respect I have two questions.

1. In which range of port numbers should I search for? (I used ports 12345, 12346, and 12347 and it was fine).

2. How can I find out if a given port is not occupied by another software?

Answer 1

If you don’t mind the port used, specify a port of 0 to the ServerSocket constructor and it will listen on any free port.

ServerSocket s = new ServerSocket(0);
System.out.println("listening on port: " + s.getLocalPort());

If you want to use a specific set of ports, then the easiest way is probably to iterate through them until one works. Something like this:

public ServerSocket create(int[] ports) throws IOException {
    for (int port : ports) {
        try {
            return new ServerSocket(port);
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            continue; // try next port
        }
    }

    // if the program gets here, no port in the range was found
    throw new IOException("no free port found");
}

Could be used like so:

try {
    ServerSocket s = create(new int[] { 3843, 4584, 4843 });
    System.out.println("listening on port: " + s.getLocalPort());
} catch (IOException ex) {
    System.err.println("no available ports");
}