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.

~930 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

Custom colors

Table columns are colored by default. Customize with the PORTVIEW_COLORS environment variable:

PORTVIEW_COLORS="port=red,pid=magenta,command=bright_cyan" portview

Available columns: port, proto, pid, user, process, uptime, mem, command

Available colors: red, green, blue, cyan, yellow, magenta, white, bold, dimmed, bright_red, bright_green, bright_blue, bright_cyan, bright_yellow, bright_magenta, bright_white, none

Defaults: port=cyan, proto=dimmed, pid=yellow, user=green, process=bold, uptime=dimmed, mem=dimmed, command=white

Use --no-color to disable all colors.

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