In my case, this error was caused by an identical server instance already running background.
The weird thing is when I started my server without notice there's one running already, the console didn't show anything like 'something is using port xxx'. I could even upload something to the server. So, it took me quite long to locate this problem.
What's more, after closing all the applications I can imagine, I still could not find the process which is using this port in my Mac's activity monitor. I have to use lsof
to trace. The culprit was not surprising - it's a node process. However, with the PID shown in the terminal, I found the port number in the monitor is different from the one used by my server.
All in all, kill all the node processes may solve this problem directly.