stop all instances of node.js server

This is my first time working with Node.js and I ran into this problem:

I have started a Node server through the plugin of an IDE. Unfortunately, I cannot use the IDE's terminal. So I tried to run the script from the command line.

This is the problem - I am using the Express module and my app is listening some port (8080). When I start the app from the command line, it throws this error:

events.js:71
    throw arguments[1]; // Unhandled 'error' event
                   ^
Error: listen EADDRINUSE
    at errnoException (net.js:770:11)
    at HTTPServer.Server._listen2 (net.js:910:14)
    at listen (net.js:937:10)
    at HTTPServer.Server.listen (net.js:986:5)
    at Object.<anonymous> (C:\xampp\htdocs\node\chat\app.js:5:5)
    at Module._compile (module.js:449:26)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:467:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:356:32)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:312:12)
    at Module.runMain (module.js:492:10)

Even though I am not very sure what this error could be I assumed that it's because the app is listening on a port which is already in use. So I did:

netstat -an

I can see 

TCP    0.0.0.0:8080           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING

It's because the Node server is already started when I tried to start it from the IDE.

So I want to know, how can I stop all server instances? Also if you can tell me how to detect what's running on a port and kill it.

You could bind process.exit() to an error event to cause the Node instance to terminate.

A more direct answer to your question is to use killall node in your terminal to kill all processes named node.

Edit: For Windows, use taskkill /IM node.exe.

You can use lsof get the process that has bound to the required port.

Unfortunately the flags seem to be different depending on system, but on Mac OS X you can run

lsof -Pi | grep LISTEN

For example, on my machine I get something like:

mongod     8662 jacob    6u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e0970fbe9      0t0  TCP localhost:27017 (LISTEN)
mongod     8662 jacob    7u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e0f9c24b1      0t0  TCP localhost:28017 (LISTEN)
memcached  8680 jacob   17u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e0971f7d1      0t0  TCP *:11211 (LISTEN)
memcached  8680 jacob   18u  IPv6 0x17ceae4e0bdf6479      0t0  TCP *:11211 (LISTEN)
mysqld     9394 jacob   10u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e080c4001      0t0  TCP *:3306 (LISTEN)
redis-ser 75429 jacob    4u  IPv4 0x17ceae4e1ba8ea59      0t0  TCP localhost:6379 (LISTEN)

The second number is the PID and the port they're listening to is on the right before "(LISTEN)". Find the rogue PID and kill -9 $PID to terminate with extreme prejudice.

You can try this:

taskkill /IM node.exe -F