Often, when restarting Django runserver, if I use the same port number, I get a 'port is already in use' message. Subsequently, I need to increment the port number each time to avoid this.
It's not the case on all servers, however, so I'm wondering how I might achieve this on the current system that I'm working on?
BTW, the platform is Ubuntu 8.10
You're getting that message because the server is already running (possibly in the background). Make sure to kill the process (bring it to the foreground and press ctrl-c) to stop the process.
Like mipadi said, you should be terminating the server (ctrl+c) and returning to the command prompt before calling manage.py runserver again.
The only thing that could be disrupting this would be if you've somehow managed to make runserver act as a daemon. If this is the case, I'm guessing you're using the Django test server as the actual web server, which you should NOT do. The Django test server is single threaded, slow and fragile, suitable only for local development.
No, he's not an idiot guys. Same thing happens to me. Apparently it's a bug with the python UUID process with continues running long after the django server is shutdown which ties the port up.