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Chris Bongers
Chris Bongers

Posted on • Originally published at daily-dev-tips.com

Thank you, Apple, for hijacking port 5000 😣

You might have already upgraded to Mac OS Monterey. If not, there might be an unpleasant surprise awaiting you.

For me, it was running the following command.

npm run dev
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And getting a message stating port 5000 is already in use...

It took me a good couple of minutes to find out no other application was using this port, and I was baffled at this point.

Surely all I did was upgrade to Monterey...

Re-opening port 5000 on Mac OS Monterey

After doing some research, I did a portscan and noticed "AirPlay Receiver" was using this port.

That didn't sound like anything I made.
Did some more research to find out that the AirPlay receiver is on by default.

To re-enable port 5000, you can simply turn off this checkbox.

AirPlay Receiver in macOS Monterey listening on port 5000

You can find this checkbox in Settings > Sharing > AirPlay Receiver.

This is not a new thing though, Apple has been using port 5000 for AirPlay since 2004.
The only new part is the introduction to having a Mac listening to AirPlay, which, as mentioned, uses port 5000.

If you wish to use AirPlay on your Mac, I'd suggest switching your development to a different port.

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