Kaval. Guard your ports.
[kaa-val] · noun · guard / watch
See what's listening. Kill what shouldn't be. A developer-focused port and process manager for your terminal — built in Rust. Fast and interactive.
MIT · macOS & Linux
Know your ports. Control your stack.
Stop running lsof | grep five times a day.
Port scanner
See every listening TCP/UDP port and the process behind it, at a glance.
One-key kill
Terminate rogue processes with a single keystroke — SIGTERM or SIGKILL.
Smart detection
Auto-identifies 56+ dev tools by port and name: Next.js, Postgres, Docker & more.
Scriptable
JSON output, exit codes and one-liners for CI scripts and your own tooling.
Ready to guard your ports?
Install Kaval in seconds. No dependencies, no setup.
brew update && brew tap AppachiTech/kaval && brew install kavalFrequently asked questions
Does Kaval need sudo?
No for viewing ports. Yes for killing system processes or processes owned by other users. Regular dev processes (node, postgres, etc.) do not require sudo.
How is it different from lsof?
Kaval gives you an interactive TUI with real-time filtering, sorting, service detection, clipboard yank and one-key kill. lsof gives you a wall of text you pipe through grep five times.
Can I kill multiple ports at once?
Yes. "kav kill 3000 5432" kills all matching ports in one command, with a scriptable exit code when nothing is found.
Does it work with Docker?
Yes. Docker containers are detected and labelled, and browser-proxied ports are grouped to avoid duplicate rows.
Is it open source?
Yes, MIT licensed. Source at github.com/AppachiTech/kaval.