LiveReload is super useful, especially in combination with grunt-contrib-watch as it enables me to quickly see my code reflected in the browser.

However, I am often working on more than one project and that can mean constantly having to shut down the running LiveReload server so that I can run grunt watch in another project’s directory.

To save the hassle of finding the process ID so that I can kill the server, I wrote a quick bash function to find whatever is running on the standard LR port of 35729 and kill it.

Thus… lrkill

I simply put this in my ~/.bash_profile and ran source ~/.bash_profile to update the current shell.

lrkill() {
    LRPID=`lsof -n -i4TCP:35729 | grep LISTEN | awk '{print $2}'`

    if [ $LRPID ]
        then
        echo 'Killing LiveReload server (PID: '$LRPID')'
        kill $LRPID
    fi
}

Now all I need to do is call lrkill and then grunt watch and my new LiveReload server is up an running.

This works in OSX, but other OS users may need to find an equivalent of lsof to achieve the same thing.