Question

I’m reading through the excellent online book http://nodebeginner.org/ and trying out the simple code

var http = require("http");

function onRequest(request, response) {
  response.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"});
  response.write("Hello World");
  response.end();
}

http.createServer(onRequest).listen(8888); 

Now I didn’t know (and I still don’t know!) how to shut down node.js gracefully, so I just went ctrl+z. Now each time I try to run node server.js I get the following error messages.

node.js:134
        throw e; // process.nextTick error, or 'error' event on first tick
        ^
Error: EADDRINUSE, Address already in use
    at Server._doListen (net.js:1100:5)
    at net.js:1071:14
    at Object.lookup (dns.js:153:45)
    at Server.listen (net.js:1065:20)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/Users/Bob/server.js:7:4)
    at Module._compile (module.js:402:26)
    at Object..js (module.js:408:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:334:31)
    at Function._load (module.js:293:12)
    at Array.<anonymous> (module.js:421:10)

So, two questions:

1) How do I shut down node.js gracefully?

2) How do I repair the mess I’ve created?

Answer 1

1. Use Ctrl+C to exit the node process gracefully

2. To clean up the mess depends on your platform, but basically you need to find the remains of the process in which node was running and kill it.

   For example, on Unix: ps -ax | grep node will give you an entry like:

   1039 ttys000    0:00.11 node index.js
   

   where index.js is the name of your node file.

   In this example, 1039 is the process id (yours will be different), so kill -9 1039 will end it, and you’ll be able to bind to the port again.