I can’t be the only one who occasionally tries to start rails server and gets:
Ctrl-C to shutdown server
A server is already running. Check ./tmp/pids/server.pid.
Open your terminal and type in (this command will unfortunately close down your browser windows as well.)
kill -9 $(lsof -i tcp:3000 -t)
Now run rails server and it will succeed.
Creating a Ruby File
Because I won’t remember this cryptic looking command, I like to create a separate ruby-kill.rb file right in my Rails project directory.
Add this inside the ruby-kill.rb:
system("kill -9 $(lsof -i tcp:3000 -t)")
Run this file whenever you need to kill the rails server.