Question

When I am trying to start Apache server from Eclipse, I am getting message as:

Several ports (8085, 8009) required by Tomcat v6.0 Server at localhost are already in use. The server may already be running in another process, or a system process may be using the port. To start this server you will need to stop the other process or change the port number(s).

I find the ports are opened by any process by the OS using “netstat -an“

I found below data as listening.

TCP    0.0.0.0:8009           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING
TCP    0.0.0.0:8080           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING
TCP    0.0.0.0:8085           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING
TCP    [::]:8009              [::]:0                 LISTENING
TCP    [::]:8080              [::]:0                 LISTENING
TCP    [::]:8085              [::]:0                 LISTENING

I don’t know whether this are useful process, or can I release this ports.

Answer 1

If tomcat is already running eclipse will report this. This could happen if eclipse crashed.

If you only have one instance of tomcat on your machine

Try stopping it

bin/shutdown.sh

or on windows

bin/shutdown.bat

and then restarting tomcat from eclipse.

On linux

You can verify those ports are in use by another tomcat (or the same one that is already running) with

netstat -anp #running as the superuser the -p option will say what the process is

You can then check the process table to cross reference the ports

ps aux | grep java

or

ps aux | grep 1234 #replacing 1234 with the PID reported by netstat

If it is tomcat and it won’t shutdown after running bin/shutdown.sh then you can kill it using the kill commmand.

If you do have something else that is using those ports

• edit conf/server.xml
• change the ports that tomcat will use, try 6080, 6005, etc
• start tomcat from eclipse again