Kaval — Guard your ports.

Kaval (காவல், Tamil for "Guard/Watch") is a developer-focused port and process manager TUI built in Rust.

Stop running lsof -i :3000 | grep LISTEN. Kaval shows all listening ports, maps them to processes, identifies known dev tools, and lets you kill with a keystroke.

Features

• See everything at a glance — all listening ports with process name, PID, CPU, memory, uptime
• Smart service detection — recognizes Vite, Next.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, Django, Docker, Elasticsearch, and 56+ more
• Interactive TUI — filter, sort, navigate, kill processes — all from one screen
• One-shot commands — kav list, kav check 3000, kav kill 3000 for scripting
• JSON output — kav list --json for piping to other tools
• Sort by any column — kav list --sort cpu to find what's eating resources
• Multi-port operations — kav check 3000 5432 8080 or kav kill 3000 5432
• Color-coded — green for dev servers, yellow for databases, purple for caches
• Safe terminal handling — panic hook ensures your terminal is never left broken

Install

Homebrew (recommended):

brew update && brew tap AppachiTech/kaval && brew install kaval

Manual (macOS):

curl -sL https://downloads.appachi.tech/macos/kav-macos-latest.tar.gz | tar xz
sudo mv kav /usr/local/bin/

Manual (Linux):

curl -sL https://downloads.appachi.tech/linux/kav-linux-latest.tar.gz | tar xz
sudo mv kav /usr/local/bin/

Cargo (crates.io):

cargo install kaval

Build from source:

cargo build --release
sudo cp target/release/kav /usr/local/bin/

Update

brew upgrade kaval                # Homebrew

Manual install users can re-run the install command — the URL always points to the latest release.

Usage

kav                       # Launch interactive TUI
kav list                  # Print all listening ports
kav list --json           # JSON output
kav list --sort cpu       # Sort by CPU usage (port, name, cpu, mem)
kav list --tcp            # Show only TCP ports
kav list --watch          # Refresh in-place every 2s (Ctrl+C to exit)
kav list -w -f postgres   # Watch filtered to postgres only
kav check 3000            # What's on port 3000?
kav check 3000 5432 8080  # Check multiple ports
kav kill 3000             # Kill process on port 3000
kav kill 3000 5432 -f     # Force kill on multiple ports
kav man | man -l -        # View man page inline

Exit Codes

Designed for scripting: kav check 3000 && echo "server is up" or kav kill 3000 || echo "nothing to kill".

JSON Output Schema

kav list --json outputs a JSON array — one object per listening port:

[
  {
    "port": 5432,
    "protocol": "TCP",
    "process": "postmaster",
    "service": "PostgreSQL",
    "pid": 1234,
    "cpu": 0.5,
    "memory_mb": 42.0,
    "uptime_secs": 3600
  }
]

Example usage with jq:

kav list --json | jq '.[] | select(.service == "PostgreSQL")'
kav list --json | jq 'map(select(.cpu > 10)) | sort_by(.cpu) | reverse'
kav list --json | jq '[.[].port]'

TUI Keyboard Shortcuts

Privacy

• Zero storage: Kaval writes nothing to disk. No config, no logs, no database.
• Zero network: Kaval makes no network connections of any kind.
• Zero telemetry: No analytics, no crash reports, no data collection.

Links

• Website
• FAQ
• Privacy Policy
• Contributing
• Changelog
• Security Policy

License

MIT — Madhubalan Appachi