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Find the orphaned dev-server processes squatting on your ports, and reap them from Raycast.
You kill a terminal, but the vite / node / cargo run it launched keeps running — reparented to the OS, still holding port 3000. Next time you npm run dev the port is "already in use" and you have no idea which ghost to kill.
Portreaper is not a generic port viewer. Its job is to decide which listeners are orphaned dev-server zombies, so you can act on a verdict instead of a raw process list.
electron-vite main process — adopted by launchd after its parent node died, listening on nothing — is invisible to a port scan, but it is exactly the kind of residue worth clearing.confirmed / likely / possible, and every row shows the signals behind the call: reparented to PID 1, launcher chain ends at a dead shell, dead terminal session, dev-server command line, duplicate instance of the same project.launchd, brew services, or pm2, and apps installed in a standard location, are never flagged. Identity beats location, though: a script runtime is judged by its script and a headless automation browser by its command line — so an orphaned python app.py, or a Playwright Chrome nobody cleaned up, is still caught even when the binary sits in a standard path.A port viewer answers "what is on port 3000?" — you already know something is in your way, and you need to find it and free it. The Store covers that case well; Port Manager is the closest one, and for that job a plain port viewer is the more direct tool.
Portreaper answers a different question: "what is still running that nobody is responsible for?" You are not looking up a port you already care about — you are finding out what the last three days of development left behind.
Everything in the design follows from that:
confirmed / likely / possible and carries the signals behind the call. A list you still have to interpret has not answered the question.electron-vite main process listens on nothing. Under "free this port" it is out of scope by definition; under "what did I leave behind" it is the whole point.launchd, brew services, pm2, apps in standard install locations, and dev servers with a live terminal behind them are exempt automatically — deciding what not to flag is most of the work.The two overlap where the questions overlap: a zombie squatting on port 3000 shows up in either tool. Everywhere else, they are answering different things.
The engine captures each process's creation time during the scan and re-checks it immediately before killing. If it moved, the kill is refused. That closes the window where a PID gets recycled between the moment you look at the list and the moment you press Enter — killing a recycled PID would mean terminating an unrelated process.
Termination always asks for confirmation first, and "terminated" means the process is actually gone: after the signal is delivered, Portreaper re-checks until the process disappears. If it hangs on, you are told so and offered Force Kill, instead of getting a green checkmark over a process that never died.
One case this specifically covers: a dev server suspended with Ctrl-Z (or stopped by touching the terminal in the background) never processes a terminate signal — it sits in the pending queue while the OS cheerfully reports success. Portreaper labels those rows stopped and wakes the process up so it can shut itself down.
Portreaper also ships as a macOS menubar app. Both frontends run the same classification engine and read the same whitelist file, so a star you add here shows up in the desktop app's next scan (within ~2 seconds) and vice versa.
The desktop app is optional — this extension works on its own.
The classification logic lives in a small command-line binary, portreaper-cli. On first use the extension downloads it from the project's GitHub release and verifies it against the published SHA-256 checksum; a binary that fails verification is deleted, never executed. Nothing is installed system-wide — the binary lives in the extension's own support directory.
If you already have it (built from source, or installed via cargo install), the extension finds it automatically. To point at a copy in an unusual location, set Portreaper CLI Path in the extension preferences.
Each verdict comes with the evidence behind it in plain English — "Whatever launched it has exited", "Looks like a dev server". Every phrase maps one-to-one onto a signal emitted by the engine, and that mapping is machine-checked against the engine's reason enum in CI, so the wording can never drift from what the engine actually decided. The desktop app's detail panel additionally explains each signal in depth.
MIT licensed.