[raskrebs]

I always have a bunch of local projects running, particularly during the weekend where I'm rarely working on one thing at a time. A big pain of mine was constantly running into port: Redis from one project blocking another, orphaned dev servers from old worktrees, Docker containers I forgot about. The usual fix is lsof -iTCP | grep ..., then figuring out what the PID actually is, then killing it. But I always forget the command, and it doesn’t really include all the information that I like.

So I built this lightweight CLI. Single binary, no dependencies. It shows everything listening on localhost with process names, Docker container info, clickable URLs etc.

Sure there are workarounds, but none that satisfied my need for a short, easily rememberable command. Also nothing really has the same satisfaction as running sonar kill 3000 — it just feels nice. I’ve already been approached by a few agent orchestration tools that have been struggling with the same thing. It's really useful when you have multiple agents running, but it's not built for just that use case, I have also find it handy when killing off all containers after a failed cleanup and so on. Also know that MCPs are dead and CLIs are the new thing in agentic coding, this might be a useful tool for Claude, particularly when a compose process exits before all containers are stopped.

Open for contributions, ideas and feedback.

[embedding-shape]

> I’ve already been approached by a few agent orchestration tools that have been struggling with the same thing

Wow, this says more about the agent orchestration tool ecosystem than what you might think, that they're unable to kill child processes they themselves spawn makes it seem like they have zero clue about what they're doing.

Probably why my impression always end up with "Wow, what a vibe-coded mess" when I look through the source of all these harnesses, they don't seem engineered at all.

[msdz]

> that they're unable to [manage and] kill child processes they themselves spawn makes it seem like they have zero clue about what they're doing.

Yeah, at the bare minimum these projects could also use something like portless[1] which literally maps ports to human- (and language model-)readable, named .localhost URLs. Which _should_ heavily alleviate assignment of processes to projects and vice versa, since at that point, hard-to-remember port numbers completely leave the equation. You could even imagine prefixing them if you've got that much going on for the ultimate "overview", like project1-db.localhost, project1-dev.localhost, etc.

[1] https://port1355.dev/

[embedding-shape]

Well, or just use port 0 like we've done for decades, read what port got used, then use that. No more port collisions ever. I thought most people were already aware of that by now, but judging from that project even existing, seems I was wrong.

[hackerthemonkey]

That’s a little different, right? Using port 0 would imply that clients have not hard coded what port they should connect to and also we don’t mind having duplicate processes occupying other ports which are no longer on active use

[rtpg]

This is a stupidly annoying problem because it's _very easy_ to accidentally spawn children that won't get killed up in many kill situations because the distinction between processes and process groupes papered over by the fact that shells will be nice enough to kill via process group.

But if your program is some TUI in raw mode its ctrl+c handler is often just killing itself... leaving its children along! Process groups in Unix are a stupid mess and the default being "a process can go away with the subprocess sticking around" rather than the inverse has just caused so many of these long-standing issues.

[pluc]

Have a look at Evan Hahn's murder util: https://codeberg.org/EvanHahn/dotfiles/src/commit/843b9ee13d...

[0cf8612b2e1e]

Sold on the name alone. It also has the API I never realized I needed

  puts 'usage:'
  puts 'murder 123    # kill by pid'
  puts 'murder ruby   # kill by process name'
  puts 'murder :3000  # kill by port'

[raskrebs]

Will check it out