Ganache EADDRINUSE: Address Already in Use

While developing Ethereum dApps, you’ll inevitably run into the situation where your local blockchain (geth or Ganache) didn’t shut down gracefully. Maybe your terminal crashed, maybe you force-quit something, or maybe you just forgot it was running.

The next time you try to start it up, you get the dreaded EADDRINUSE error:

Ganache CLI v6.2.5 (ganache-core: 2.3.3)
listen EADDRINUSE: address already in use 127.0.0.1:8545

The fix is simple. Find the process that’s still holding onto the port using lsof:

lsof -i :8545

You’ll see output like this:

COMMAND     PID USER   FD   TYPE             DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
Ganache   45624  dbe   32u  IPv4 0x2870b9f699b92777      0t0  TCP localhost:64105->localhost:8545 (ESTABLISHED)

Make sure the process isn’t something crucial, then kill it using the PID from the output:

kill 45624

That’s it. Start Ganache again and you’re back in business.