netstat -tulnap shows me what ports are in use. How do I free up a port in Linux?

As the others have said, you’ll have to kill all processes that are listening on that port. The easiest way to do that would be to use the fuser(1) command. For example, to see all of the processes listening for http requests on port 80 (run as root or use sudo):

# fuser 80/tcp

If you want to kill them, then just add the -k option.