🔌 Port Buster
Detect and terminate rogue processes hogging your local development ports,
right from the VS Code sidebar. Cross-platform: Windows, macOS, and Linux.
  
Features
- 📡 Live sidebar view of every listening TCP port, with process name and PID.
- ⭐ Monitored ports pin the ports you care about (
3000, 5432, ...) to the top.
- 🛡️ Excluded processes never list or kill critical system processes.
- 🗑️ 1-click Kill, gated behind a confirmation dialog by default.
- 🔄 Configurable auto-refresh.
Configuration
| Setting |
Default |
Description |
portBuster.monitoredPorts |
[3000, 4200, 5000, 8080, 5432] |
Ports pinned to the top of the list. |
portBuster.excludedProcesses |
["System", "svchost.exe", "launchd", ...] |
Process names never shown/killable. |
portBuster.showOnlyMonitoredPorts |
false |
Hide everything except monitored ports. |
portBuster.confirmBeforeKill |
true |
Require confirmation before terminating a process. |
portBuster.autoRefreshInterval |
5000 |
Auto-refresh interval in ms (0 disables). |
portBuster.version / portBuster.buildNumber |
- |
Read-only build metadata. |
How scanning works
- Windows:
Get-NetTCPConnection + Get-Process via a single static
PowerShell script, output as JSON.
- macOS/Linux:
lsof -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN -F pcnPT (machine-readable
field output), falling back to ss -tlnp, then netstat -tlnp if
neither is available.
Contributing
Issues and PRs welcome! Please run npm run lint && npm test before
submitting.
Credits
- Designed and built by Elias.
- Credits to my friend for bringing me this idea!
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