Apache : How to Solve port 80 is occupied problem on Windows

The other day I decided to install EasyPHP (a WAMP package that includes PHP, Apache, MySQL) on my machine running Windows 7. After install I ran the application, but to my surprise, Apache server was not working. It complained that Port 80 is used by another application. I thought this issue would be easily solved, but it took me a while to figure out what exactly is causing the problem. In this article I will show you what I tried and how I finally solved the Apache problem of not being able to run.

The error message that the EasyPHP gave was this:

I tried to start server manually but that gave me the following error:

I could of course just change the port, but I really wanted to find out what is causing this problem.

EasyPHP error message suggested to locate cports.exe to find the culprit, but I decided to first check the Programs and Features in control panel to see if I can figure out why the Apache server cannot listen to default port 80.

Using Programs and Features to look for application causing the issue

Looking at the list of installed programs I quickly found one such application that might be causing this issue. It was IIS Express 8 which was installed long time ago and I have totally forgotten about it. So solution seemed simple. Uninstall IIS Express 8 and the issue will go away, but to my surprise, that still didn’t solve the problem at all. Starting Apache failed again with the same port 80 is busy problem. So I decided to take advice from that EasyPHP error message about using cports.exe.

Running CurrPorts (cports.exe) as the error message suggested

CurrPorts is a little utility that lists all currently opened TCP/IP and UDP ports and the processes that opened those ports. If you also have EasyPHP installed, you should already have this utility. On my machine running Windows 7 64-bit I located cports.exe at:

C:\Program Files (x86)\EasyPHP-DevServer-14.1VC11\binaries\tools\cports\

When I ran the cports.exe I got a list processes listening to different ports and there was one listening to port 80, but unfortunately for me, there was no useful information about which process is doing this as shown below:

For Process Name it showed System while Process ID showed 4. Even the option Kill Processes Of Selected Ports was grayed out.

Since currPorts was not giving me the information needed I decided to try my luck with commands in command prompt.

Using netstat command from Command Prompt

The one I tried first was netstat, a command showing network activity.

Looking at the available parameters, using those listed below seemed worth a try

• -a : Displays all connections and listening ports.
• -n : Displays addresses and port numbers in numerical form.
• -o : Displays the owning process ID associated with each connection.
• -b : Displays the executable involved in creating each connection or listening port. (Requires administrator permission)

Due to –b parameter, I had to run cmd as an administrator as shown below:

Then I typed:

netstat –anob | more

Looking for :80 under Local Address column I had this:

and below all these, there was a message “Can not obtain ownership information”.

PID stands for Process ID with PID 4 being a System Process where most system processes originate from. I tried to use Process Hacker utility to look for any information that would point me to what is causing this problem but I didn’t find any.

So I decided to try another command net stop which is discussed next.

Using net stop command from command prompt

Command net stop <service> stops a running service. If that service has other services that depend on it, it will output a list of these services and prompts you for confirmation. This seemed like a great way to check what services depend on http service, so I typed the following line:

net stop http

The goal here was not to stop http service, so I didn't confirm when prompted for confirmation. Instead, I just wanted to get the list of services that use it. The list I received is shown below:

By individually stopping each service in the generated list (by using services.msc), I wanted to find out if any of these services are responsible for taking away port 80. When particular service was stopped and had no effect on Apache, I chose the next service in the list.

After stopping all the services in the list I was still getting the error, so I went back to the web looking for possible causes and what caught my attention was http.sys process which is discussed next.

Finding out processes that use http.sys

Http.sys is a driver that enables multiple processes to listen to HTTP traffic on the same port. But examining this driver in Task Manager and also on Process Hacker revealed no useful information relating to ports.

And then I stumbled upon HttpSysManager tool. This looked like a very promising little utility that might reveal what is blocking Apache to listen on the default port. I ran the application, selected Acls tag and found some prefixes with port 80 on it as shown below:

Two of them were for SQL Reports. I quickly checked the list of services and found SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). After I stopped it Apache was able to run without error.

There was still one thing to check up. I wondered if this SQL Reporting service was the only culprit or will any of the stopped services from the net stop http list still cause problems. By restarting all those services the Apache was unable to run once again. In the end it turned out that besides SQL Server Reporting Service I also had to disable World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3SVC). After those two were disabled, port 80 was finally available for Apache.

Conclusion

If Apache won’t start on port 80, we can either set it to listen to another port, or we can try to locate the application or service and stop them if they are not needed. With the help of CMD commands and various utilities this can be an easy task, but if the Process listening to port 80 is System Process with PID 4, then it takes a little more effort.

I hope you found the information here useful. If so, consider dropping a comment or share the post on social networks.