We’ll use CurrPorts, simply run the tool and click the Local Port column header to sort the connections by port number.
A couple of small, portable and easy to use tools are Sysinternals TCPVIew and Nirsoft CurrPorts.
There are many different network monitoring tools that can show you what ports are being used by the system from a user interface, even your antivirus software might have the ability. A common entry with a PID value of 4 means the port is being used by the Windows System process which always has a PID of 4. If you receive “Can not obtain ownership information”, it becomes more difficult to trace the offender. Sometimes though, you will not be told what the process name is. In this case the process is Skype.exe, from that information we can try to make Skype use another port and let our Apache server use port 80 instead. If there is an entry look underneath on the next line and it will hopefully tell you the executable that is on the port. Scroll to the top and look for a local address with a port of “:80”. Open an administrator Command Prompt and type the following command: There’s several ways to check the ports and what is using them, we’ll look at the command line and a port viewer tool. Not every piece of software tells you though so more work might be needed.
Luckily, some server software like XAMPP, WAMP Server and others usually tell you what is causing the issue so you don’t have to go through too much detective work. If your local Apache server is not loading and you believe another application has a hold on port 80, it’s a good idea to find out what the cause is.
Here we show you how to find out what might be using port 80 on your computer and what to do if you have to change the port from 80 to something else in your Apache server software. As several programs cannot share the same port, you need to find what is already using port 80, then decide what to do. By default Apache relies on port 80 to be free, and if it isn’t, the server won’t start and the local website won’t load. When setting up your local web server, one issue that might stop it from running is something else could be using the system port that Apache requires to function.
There are many server packages around that can do this such as XAMPP, WAMP Server, Uniform Server, UwAmp and more. You cannot just copy the website files to your computer and expect them to work, as a local web server such as Apache and a MySQL database will be required. The easiest way is to create a local website on your own computer. While it’s possible to perform such tasks on the fly and apply them directly to your website or upload the files via FTP, you could introduce bugs, glitches or even security holes to your visitors.Ī sensible solution is cloning your website and making changes to the backup first to see if they work. Or you might want to do something more substantial like completely redesign the website. It could be a small change such as a editing the CSS, Javascript or PHP code on your site. If you are a webmaster it’s quite likely you will need to periodically make changes to your website.