PortFree - See Every Port. Control Every Process

The fastest way to discover, understand, and control every process listening on your machine.

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Inspiration

Ever typed lsof, copied a PID, killed it, and then did it all over again 10 minutes later?

We were tired of it.

Managing ports from the terminal works, but it breaks your flow. We wanted one place where we could see every port, know what was happening, and fix problems in seconds.

PortFree started as a tool for macOS because that's what we use every day. Then we thought - why stop there? Let's make it open source and build it for everyone.

What it does

PortFree is a local dashboard that helps you monitor and control your machine.

  • Scan all listening ports
  • Find the process behind every port
  • See live CPU, memory, and system stats
  • Classify ports by risk
  • Kill processes with one click
  • Search, filter, and pin important ports

No more switching between lsof, ps, kill, and netstat.

How we built it

We built PortFree with React, Vite, Express, and Tailwind CSS.

For system data, we used systeminformation, find-process, tree-kill, and native tools like lsof and netstat.

The goal was simple - make something that feels as fast as the terminal but much easier to use.

Challenges we ran into

Every operating system behaves differently.

Getting reliable port information, matching ports to processes, handling permissions, and keeping everything updated in real time took more work than we expected.

Designing a dashboard that shows lots of information without feeling overwhelming was another challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a tool that we actually use ourselves.

We're also proud that PortFree is open source, making it easy for anyone to contribute and help improve it.

What we learned

This project taught us a lot about how operating systems manage ports and processes.

More importantly, we learned that developer tools don't have to be boring. They can be powerful, beautiful, and fun to use.

What's next for PortFree - See Every Port. Control Every Process

We're just getting started.

Next, we want to add Docker support, better Windows and Linux support, process history, smarter risk detection, remote monitoring, plugins, and AI-powered insights.

If you've ever been frustrated by port conflicts, we'd love for you to build PortFree with us.

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