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Port in Use Error

The "Port in Use" error happens when Peacock is trying to start, but the port it's set to use is already in use.

Here's what it looks like:

The error message shown when Peacock tries to use a port that's in use

What is a Port?​

In simple terms, a port is a thing programs and other computers can connect to and get data from. In order for the game to talk to Peacock's server, the server has to occupy a port. Ports must have an assigned number. The default port used by Peacock is 80, but port numbers can be any whole number between 1 and 65535.

Visual Studio​

If you use Visual Studio, you may have installed some services that interfere with Peacock by also running on Port 80. To fix:

  1. Press the Windows key and R at the same time.
  2. Type services.msc in the popup box, then hit Okay.
  3. Check for W3SVC: World Wide Web Publishing Service and Web Deployment Agent Service in the service manager.
  4. Disable both if present.
  5. Try again, if it doesn't work, restart your computer, then try once more.

Changing the Port​

Here's how to change the port Peacock uses, if you don't want to stop the process on Port 80:

In the instructions below, please substitute PORTNUMBER with a port that is not currently running on your PC, e.g. 8080, 6969, 3000, etc.

  • Change Start Server.cmd to be as follows: 
    @echo off
    SET PORT=PORTNUMBER
    .\nodedist\node.exe chunk0.js
    PAUSE
  • Type 127.0.0.1:PORTNUMBER into the Patcher's URL field, as shown here:

On Linux​

Peacock's default port is 80, but on Linux, the normal user account does not have permission to use port 80. Check out the Changing the Port section above.