WHATPORT(9876) whatport.net WHATPORT(9876)
9876

Karma test runner; sd (Session Director)

IANA says Session Director, but on a developer's machine this is almost always the Karma browser test runner.

TCP IANA registry

Description

The registration is sd, "Session Director", from Van Jacobson's MBone-era session-announcement work, which you will effectively never meet today. What you will meet is Karma: its default port config value is 9876, and it runs a web server that browsers connect to in order to execute a project's unit tests. Karma was deprecated by its maintainers in favour of Web Test Runner, Jest, and Vitest, but it is still present in many Angular and older JavaScript projects, so a listener on 9876 usually means a test run in progress or a CI container that did not shut down.

Exposed to the internet?

Do not expose

Karma exists to load arbitrary project JavaScript into a connected browser. Exposing it hands strangers a code-execution surface in whatever browser reaches it; keep it bound to localhost.

Check it yourself

$ curl -sI http://localhost:9876/

See also

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