Killing nodemon process in mac?

If you've used nodemon for any length of time, you've run into this: you hit Ctrl+C to stop your dev server, but the process doesn't actually die. It just sits there hogging the port like a zombie. Then you try to restart and get slapped with the dreaded EADDRINUSE error.

I deal with this at least once a week. Here's the fastest way to fix it.

TL;DR: Nodemon is a Node.js developer tool that helps to watch for file changes and restarting the node application automatically. Sometimes nodemon processes get stuck and you need to kill them manually.

The Problem

You've stopped your nodemon process (or so you thought), but when you try to start it again:

Error: listen EADDRINUSE: address already in use :::3000

This means the previous nodemon process is still running in the background, squatting on your port.

The Quick Fix

Open your terminal and nuke it:

killall -9 node

This kills all running Node.js processes on your Mac. It's the sledgehammer approach — fast, effective, and a little destructive if you have other Node processes you actually want running.

The Targeted Fix

If you have multiple Node.js apps running and only want to kill the one hogging port 3000, find its process ID first:

lsof -i :3000

Then kill just that process:

kill -9 <PID>

Replace <PID> with the actual process ID from the lsof output. This is the surgical approach — I use it when I've got a database migration script or something else running that I don't want to accidentally terminate.

After years of this, I've honestly just aliased killall -9 node to kn in my .zshrc. Life's too short to type that out every time nodemon throws a tantrum.

Sources

1. Node.js Documentation
2. nodemon Documentation
3. MDN Web Docs