Sockets: Discover port availability using Java

How do I programmatically determine the availability of a port in a given machine using Java?

i.e given a port number, determine whether it is already being used or not?.

Solution 1:

This is the implementation coming from the Apache camel project:

/**
 * Checks to see if a specific port is available.
 *
 * @param port the port to check for availability
 */
public static boolean available(int port) {
    if (port < MIN_PORT_NUMBER || port > MAX_PORT_NUMBER) {
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("Invalid start port: " + port);
    }

    ServerSocket ss = null;
    DatagramSocket ds = null;
    try {
        ss = new ServerSocket(port);
        ss.setReuseAddress(true);
        ds = new DatagramSocket(port);
        ds.setReuseAddress(true);
        return true;
    } catch (IOException e) {
    } finally {
        if (ds != null) {
            ds.close();
        }

        if (ss != null) {
            try {
                ss.close();
            } catch (IOException e) {
                /* should not be thrown */
            }
        }
    }

    return false;
}

They are checking the DatagramSocket as well to check if the port is avaliable in UDP and TCP.

Hope this helps.

Solution 2:

For Java 7 you can use try-with-resource for more compact code:

private static boolean available(int port) {
    try (Socket ignored = new Socket("localhost", port)) {
        return false;
    } catch (IOException ignored) {
        return true;
    }
}

Solution 3:

It appears that as of Java 7, David Santamaria's answer doesn't work reliably any more. It looks like you can still reliably use a Socket to test the connection, however.

private static boolean available(int port) {
    System.out.println("--------------Testing port " + port);
    Socket s = null;
    try {
        s = new Socket("localhost", port);

        // If the code makes it this far without an exception it means
        // something is using the port and has responded.
        System.out.println("--------------Port " + port + " is not available");
        return false;
    } catch (IOException e) {
        System.out.println("--------------Port " + port + " is available");
        return true;
    } finally {
        if( s != null){
            try {
                s.close();
            } catch (IOException e) {
                throw new RuntimeException("You should handle this error." , e);
            }
        }
    }
}