The Port 80 – what service is using it and how to make it available

I stumbled upon this problem this morning when I was trying to activate my apache but was being hindered by a “Port 80 Unavailable” issue.

Upon installing apache you usually use port 80 which is the standard HTTP port on any platform.

What you have to do is check the port in use and what process is listening through it.

in windows

1. open the run via (win+r) then type “cmd”
2. type netstat -ano | find “0.0:80”
3. the 5th column is the PID (eg. 1020)
4. open the task manager (ctrl+alt+delete)
5. in the processes tab, click “view” > “select columns” > tick “PID (Process Identifier)”
6. click ok.
7. now search for the PID (eg. 1020) – this is the process that locks and listens in port 80
8. to release the port click the “end process” but be warned since there are times when the process running port 80 is an important system process, proceed at your own risk.

After terminating that process, port 80 will once again be available and ready to use.