portview

See what's on your ports, then act on it.

A diagnostic-first port viewer for Linux. No more lsof -i :3000 | grep LISTEN incantations. One command shows you what's listening, who owns it, how long it's been running, and offers to kill it if you want.

816 KB single binary. Zero runtime dependencies.

Install

One-liner (downloads pre-built binary):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mapika/portview/main/install.sh | sh

Homebrew:

brew install mapika/tap/portview

Cargo (build from source):

cargo install portview

Manual: grab the binary from Releases, chmod +x, drop in PATH.

Usage

Show all listening ports

$ portview
╭──────┬───────┬───────┬──────┬──────────┬─────────┬────────┬─────────────────────────────────────╮
│ PORT │ PROTO │ PID   │ USER │ PROCESS  │ UPTIME  │ MEM    │ COMMAND                             │
├──────┼───────┼───────┼──────┼──────────┼─────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 3000 │ TCP   │ 48291 │ mark │ node     │ 3h 12m  │ 248 MB │ next dev                            │
│ 5432 │ TCP   │ 1203  │ pg   │ postgres │ 14d 2h  │ 38 MB  │ /usr/lib/postgresql/16/bin/postgres │
│ 6379 │ TCP   │ 1198  │ redis│ redis    │ 14d 2h  │ 12 MB  │ redis-server *:6379                 │
│ 8080 │ TCP   │ 51002 │ mark │ python3  │ 22m     │ 45 MB  │ uvicorn main:app --port 8080        │
╰──────┴───────┴───────┴──────┴──────────┴─────────┴────────┴─────────────────────────────────────╯

Inspect a specific port

$ portview 3000

Port 3000 (TCP) — node (PID 48291)
  Bind:     *:3000
  Command:  next dev
  User:     mark
  Started:  3h 12m ago
  Memory:   248 MB
  CPU time: 14.3s
  Children: 3
  State:    LISTEN

  Kill process 48291? [y/N]

Search by process name

$ portview python
╭──────┬───────┬───────┬──────┬─────────┬────────┬───────┬──────────────────────────────────╮
│ PORT │ PROTO │ PID   │ USER │ PROCESS │ UPTIME │ MEM   │ COMMAND                          │
├──────┼───────┼───────┼──────┼─────────┼────────┼───────┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│ 8000 │ TCP   │ 51002 │ mark │ python3 │ 22m    │ 45 MB │ uvicorn main:app --port 8000     │
│ 8080 │ TCP   │ 51340 │ mark │ python3 │ 5m     │ 32 MB │ python3 -m http.server 8080      │
╰──────┴───────┴───────┴──────┴─────────┴────────┴───────┴──────────────────────────────────╯

Kill directly

portview -k 3000          # SIGTERM
portview -k 3000 --force  # SIGKILL

Watch mode (live refresh)

portview --watch            # refresh all ports every 1s
portview -w 3000            # watch a specific port
portview -w node            # watch filtered by process name
portview -w --json          # streaming JSON, useful for piping

The display refreshes every second. Ctrl+C exits cleanly.

JSON output

portview --json | jq '.[] | select(.process == "node")'

Show all connections (not just listening)

portview --all

What it shows

For each listening port:

Everything is read directly from procfs. No shelling out to lsof, ss, or netstat.

Why not...

portview is diagnostic-first: understand what's on your ports, then optionally act.

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/mapika/portview
cd portview
cargo build --release
cp target/release/portview /usr/local/bin/

Limitations

• Linux only (reads /proc directly). macOS/Windows support would require platform-specific backends.
• Needs read access to /proc/<pid>/fd/ for inode→pid mapping. Some processes owned by other users may require sudo.

License

MIT