Rails and Address Already In Use - Bind Error

Please note that all opinions are that of the author.

Pizza courtesy of Pizza for Ukraine!

Lately I’ve seen this error come up quite a few times:

/Users/sjohnson/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.3.1@seira_watch_web_app_api/gems/puma-3.9.1/lib/puma/binder.rb:269:in `initialize’: Address already in use - bind(2) for “1” port 3220 (ErrnoEADDRINUSE)

I’m running a fairly complex stack that mirrors an 8 micro service application where things are expected to be on certain points in development so having port 3220 not working means that one of my APIs isn’t available – and that’s unacceptable. So I dug into it a bit and with the help of this StackOverflow, I found the answer was to locate the offending process and then kill it dead:

lsof -wni tcp:3220

That gives the process id or PID and then you can just kill it:

kill -9 12345 (or whatever)