How do I free my port 80 on localhost Windows?

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.

netstat -a -b

Should tell you what program is bound to port 80

Use TcpView to find the process that listens to the port and close the process.

Other option to try is to stop SQL Server Reporting Services.

Try

netstat -anb -p tcp

that show ports and processes

I was trying to install nginx from here - http://nginx.org/en/docs/windows.html

Going to http://localhost/ will show something, at least a proper "not found" message
This is because 80 is the default port, and it was taken by other processes.

Now run below command:

net stop http

    // Above command stopped below services  
    // - SSDP Discovery  
    // - Print Spooler  
    // - BranchCache  
    // - Function Discovery Resource Publication  
    // - Function Discovery Provider Host  

Now, going to http://localhost/ will fail with a broken link page message.

Main process was BranchCache
This process, after stopped, will restart in a few seconds.
So we need to run other commands we need soon, an example below:

// this will stop
net stop http

// immeidately run other command you want to
start nginx

Now, going to http://localhost/ gave me:

Welcome to nginx!

Hope that helps.

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.

Identify the real process programmatically

(when the process ID is shown as 4)

The answers here, as usual, expect a level of interactivity.

The problem is when something is listening through HTTP.sys; then, the PID is always 4 and, as most people find, you need some tool to find the real owner.

Here's how to identify the offending process programmatically. No TcpView, etc (as good as those tools are). Does rely on netsh; but then, the problem is usually related to HTTP.sys.

$Uri = "http://127.0.0.1:8989"    # for example


# Shows processes that have registered URLs with HTTP.sys
$QueueText = netsh http show servicestate view=requestq verbose=yes | Out-String

# Break into text chunks; discard the header
$Queues    = $QueueText -split '(?<=\n)(?=Request queue name)' | Select-Object -Skip 1

# Find the chunk for the request queue listening on your URI
$Queue     = @($Queues) -match [regex]::Escape($Uri -replace '/$')


if ($Queue.Count -eq 1)
{
    # Will be null if could not pick out exactly one PID
    $ProcessId = [string]$Queue -replace '(?s).*Process IDs:\s+' -replace '(?s)\s.*' -as [int]

    if ($ProcessId)
    {
        Write-Verbose "Identified process $ProcessId as the HTTP listener. Killing..."
        Stop-Process -Id $ProcessId -Confirm
    }
}

Originally posted here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/65852847/6274530

I faced the same issue and fixed it by making a small change in the httpd.conf file which can be obtained by clicking the config button along with the Apache option.

The change I made was to replace listen 80 with listen 8080.