How do I free my port 80 on localhost Windows?

Question

I installed XAMPP 1.6.8 and for some reason it didn't work. Later realized port 80 is not free or not listening. How can I release it or make it free?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

I had this problem previously,

if you see the Task manager(after enabling the view for PID), you will find PID=4 is "port 80 in use by NT Kernel & System; "

Just go to

1. Control Panel
2. Programs
3. Turn Windows features on/off
4. check if the World wide web services under IIS is checked

If so, Uncheck and netstat(or TCPVIEW) again to see if 80 is free.

Answer 2

This is just a guess, but since port 80 is the conventional port for HTTP, you may have a webserver running on your system. Is IIS active?

If you are running IIS you may have the web farm service running. That was what was killing my xampp.

Answer 3

For me, this problem began when I hosted a VPN-connection on my Windows 8 computer.

Simply deleting the connection from "Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections" solved the problem.

Answer 4

You can use net stop http it will display which process is using. Moslty world wide web services are using

Answer 5

Type in "netstat -ano" into your command line. I saw that it was showing something for Local Address port 0.0.0.0:80.

My issue was because I had SQL Server Reporting Services on Port 80. So I followed these instructions and changed the port # from 80 to 81:

http://seankilleen.com/2012/11/how-to-stop-sql-server-reporting-services-from-using-port-80-on-your-server-field-notes/

Here is a picture of my command line AFTER I changed the port number for SQL Server Reporting Services:

If you are still having the same issue, read this forum:

http://forum.wampserver.com/read.php?2,66196,66233#REPLY

Answer 6

netstat -ano

That will show you the PID of the process that is listening on port 80. After that, open the Task Manager -> Processes tab. From the View -> Select Columns menu, enable the PID column, and you will see the name of the process listening on port 80.