AzureStorageEmulator didn’t start — the guilty party was killed

Info

In this article, you’ll find out how to see if a port is blocked by a process and how to kill it, if you want to do it.

Reason

I am writing this article because I needed to start AzureStorageEmulator, and it didn’t want to start. After some googling, I tried out to change the URLs of the services from AzureStorageEmulator.exe.config from 127.0.0.1 to localhost which didn’t help, I also tried to clear it up (AzureStorageEmulator.exe clear) which again didn’t help, added the IP in the firewall, the same result, even thought of reinstalling it, since I had it from when I was using Windows 10 and now I am using Windows 11 (which is more or less a facelift from my point of view), but actually, I realized my ports might be blocked by another process…and so it was.

My error

Investigation and Solution

To get the status of my emulator, the IP and port (even if I saw them in the config) I used AzureStorageEmulator.exe status and as you can see below the IsRunning flag was false

I took the first port (of the BlobEndpoint) and started to dig up: netstat -na | find “10000” , which is something like “Mr cmd tell me everything on the network regarding port 10000” and after that, I saw that something internally (0.0.0.0.0 IP) was listing to my port

To find out who is the guilty process you need to call netstat -ano | find “10000”

As you can see in the last column you have a process id

After this to find out the name was pretty easy: tasklist /svc /FI “PID eq 48196”

At this moment I realised that a long long time ago I installed azurite also, but on Windows 10 it wasn’t added on the startup. Now on 11 something might have changed or maybe I did something and now I do not remember, but the easy way out for me was to kill it (“taskkill /PID 48196 /F”) try again to find my port (netstat -na | find “10000”) and I got an empty list, so I was able to start my emulator once again without issues (I’ve also tried to start it “in process” just to be sure I didn’t break something else)

Since I always lose/forget the commands for searching for a port or killing a specific process from cmd, I am sharing this “tutorial” / life story with you, and hopefully, someone will find it useful, if not, I will need these commands in the future for sure!