How do you determine what technology a website is built on

Question

Quite often I come across a nice looking or functional website  and wonder what technology was used to create it  What techniques are available to figure out what a particular website was built with   Few frameworks seem to include any kind of generator meta tag like web editors do  Are there any tell-tale signs of particular languages and or frameworks     Summary of answers  Site URLs may betray the framework and or programming language but cannot be relied upon  e g  file extensions such as  asp   HTTP response headers  cookies  stylesheets and source comments may also give clues   Some nice tools for querying site details  no doubt there are many more     BuiltWith DomainTools NetCraft W3Techs SimilarTech   Firefox addons    Wappalyzer - CMS  frameworks libraries  e-commerce  message boards etc  Domain Details - IP  country and webserver details Library Detector - Javascript libraries in use   Chrome Extensions    Wappalyzer SimilarTech PageXray   Bookmarklets    WTFramework - shows Javascript framework in use

User · Answer

URLs can give a lot of clues  especially with Content Management Systems   For example  http   abcxyz com node 46  looks a lot like Drupal   Also many frameworks have standard JavaScript and CSS files they use

User · Answer

Go to Netcraft and use the  What s that site running   search box in the top left corner  Click here for the report on Stack Overflow  It won t necessarily be correct  e g   there could be caching or load balancing in the way   but it often gives you the clue you need

User · Answer

yes there are some telltale signs for common CMSs like Drupal  Joomla  Pligg   and RoR etc        ASP NET stuff is easy to spot too    but as the framework becomes more obscure it gets harder to deduce      What I usually is compare the site i am snooping with another site that I know is built using a particular tech  That sometimes works

User · Answer

URLs can give a lot of clues  especially with Content Management Systems   For example  http   abcxyz com node 46  looks a lot like Drupal   Also many frameworks have standard JavaScript and CSS files they use

User · Answer

I use 1 plug in for Firefox that gives me the IP and country for the hosting website and it s Web Server name called Domain Details  and for javascript framework I use WTFramework  I still need to wonder what script it was written on  but it is a start     Hope it helps   P S  the output will be something like this   alt text http   img88 imageshack us img88 2505 200812282328ha0 png

User · Answer

There are all sorts of things you can look out for  but it doesn t really give you any certainty as to the technology behind a site  In general  information like that is something people will want to hide  as the more information that is exposed the easier it might be for malicious parties to identify security vulnerabilities or denial of service holes   If I was interested I d probably look  in no particular order  at    urls  and file extensions  HTTP response headers Source code for comments  or standard JS libraries   Incidentally  the tools mentioned in other answers are only looking at some of the above properties of the site for you  albeit automatically  and slightly quicker

User · Answer

Examining the cookies the site gives can reveal the underlying framework   CodeIgniter  for example defaults to a telltale ci sessions cookie   Sites using PEAR Auth will do something similar

User · Answer

Check out Chrome Sniffer  a great light-weight solution

User · Answer

There are all sorts of things you can look out for  but it doesn t really give you any certainty as to the technology behind a site  In general  information like that is something people will want to hide  as the more information that is exposed the easier it might be for malicious parties to identify security vulnerabilities or denial of service holes   If I was interested I d probably look  in no particular order  at    urls  and file extensions  HTTP response headers Source code for comments  or standard JS libraries   Incidentally  the tools mentioned in other answers are only looking at some of the above properties of the site for you  albeit automatically  and slightly quicker

User · Answer

http   www similartech com is a new tool we made  that does just that and presents it very nicely

User · Answer

Check out Chrome Sniffer  a great light-weight solution

User · Answer

Most ASP NET sites are easy to identify from the  aspx in the URLs  There are also telltale signs in the HTML source  like a hidden form field named   VIEWSTATE or the WebResource axd JavaScript  HTML elements will often have id attributes starting with something like  ctl0   Rails sites will usually include stylesheets from  stylesheets and JavaScript files from  javascripts and each URL will usually have a query string containing a timestamp to thwart caching  Form fields will often follow the naming convention of model name attribute name

User · Answer

I use 1 plug in for Firefox that gives me the IP and country for the hosting website and it s Web Server name called Domain Details  and for javascript framework I use WTFramework  I still need to wonder what script it was written on  but it is a start     Hope it helps   P S  the output will be something like this   alt text http   img88 imageshack us img88 2505 200812282328ha0 png

User · Answer

You can use domaintools com to lookup the server information for a website and narrow down to whether it s open source   Microsoft   http   whois domaintools com stackoverflow com  And after that it s a matter of looking in the footer for tip-offs such as  Powered by WordPress  or  vBulletin   etc

User · Answer

You could use http   builtwith com to figure out which server and programming language was used  For example it told me that SO uses IIS7  google analytics  html4 and utf8   If you want to know the framework   well that will probably not be possible just from looking at the site  Why don t you write them an email

User · Answer

In Linux OSX I often use simple command curl -sI www site com

User · Answer

Some people might even deliberately obscure the technology they use  After all  it wouldn t take me long to tweak apache so that   asp  actually ran perl scripts and put  powered by Microsoft IIS  into my footer despite the fact I used MySQL   That way you d spend all your time trying to hack my site using vulnerabilities it doesn t actually have

User · Answer

Go to Netcraft and use the  What s that site running   search box in the top left corner  Click here for the report on Stack Overflow  It won t necessarily be correct  e g   there could be caching or load balancing in the way   but it often gives you the clue you need

User · Answer

http   www similartech com is a new tool we made  that does just that and presents it very nicely

User · Answer

There are all sorts of things you can look out for  but it doesn t really give you any certainty as to the technology behind a site  In general  information like that is something people will want to hide  as the more information that is exposed the easier it might be for malicious parties to identify security vulnerabilities or denial of service holes   If I was interested I d probably look  in no particular order  at    urls  and file extensions  HTTP response headers Source code for comments  or standard JS libraries   Incidentally  the tools mentioned in other answers are only looking at some of the above properties of the site for you  albeit automatically  and slightly quicker

User · Answer

URLs can give a lot of clues  especially with Content Management Systems   For example  http   abcxyz com node 46  looks a lot like Drupal   Also many frameworks have standard JavaScript and CSS files they use

User · Answer

I use WebParser  http   www cybermake com  that allows to determine the CMS used by a website  It allows to determine CMS for multiple websites as well as it can pull the list of websites from the search engines for a given list of keywords  Powerful tool

User · Answer

Most ASP NET sites are easy to identify from the  aspx in the URLs  There are also telltale signs in the HTML source  like a hidden form field named   VIEWSTATE or the WebResource axd JavaScript  HTML elements will often have id attributes starting with something like  ctl0   Rails sites will usually include stylesheets from  stylesheets and JavaScript files from  javascripts and each URL will usually have a query string containing a timestamp to thwart caching  Form fields will often follow the naming convention of model name attribute name

User · Answer

http   guess scritch org  does this for CMSs   Just pop in the URL and it ll try to guess the CMS  In this case it tells me my blog is running wordpress 3 4 2  which is correct  I just checked

User · Answer

You could use http   builtbased com  to figure out which server  framework and programming language was used

User · Answer

I use WebParser  http   www cybermake com  that allows to determine the CMS used by a website  It allows to determine CMS for multiple websites as well as it can pull the list of websites from the search engines for a given list of keywords  Powerful tool

User · Answer

yes there are some telltale signs for common CMSs like Drupal  Joomla  Pligg   and RoR etc        ASP NET stuff is easy to spot too    but as the framework becomes more obscure it gets harder to deduce      What I usually is compare the site i am snooping with another site that I know is built using a particular tech  That sometimes works

User · Answer

Most ASP NET sites are easy to identify from the  aspx in the URLs  There are also telltale signs in the HTML source  like a hidden form field named   VIEWSTATE or the WebResource axd JavaScript  HTML elements will often have id attributes starting with something like  ctl0   Rails sites will usually include stylesheets from  stylesheets and JavaScript files from  javascripts and each URL will usually have a query string containing a timestamp to thwart caching  Form fields will often follow the naming convention of model name attribute name

User · Answer

You can use domaintools com to lookup the server information for a website and narrow down to whether it s open source   Microsoft   http   whois domaintools com stackoverflow com  And after that it s a matter of looking in the footer for tip-offs such as  Powered by WordPress  or  vBulletin   etc

User · Answer

Examining the cookies the site gives can reveal the underlying framework   CodeIgniter  for example defaults to a telltale ci sessions cookie   Sites using PEAR Auth will do something similar

User · Answer

Most ASP NET sites are easy to identify from the  aspx in the URLs  There are also telltale signs in the HTML source  like a hidden form field named   VIEWSTATE or the WebResource axd JavaScript  HTML elements will often have id attributes starting with something like  ctl0   Rails sites will usually include stylesheets from  stylesheets and JavaScript files from  javascripts and each URL will usually have a query string containing a timestamp to thwart caching  Form fields will often follow the naming convention of model name attribute name

User · Answer

yes there are some telltale signs for common CMSs like Drupal  Joomla  Pligg   and RoR etc        ASP NET stuff is easy to spot too    but as the framework becomes more obscure it gets harder to deduce      What I usually is compare the site i am snooping with another site that I know is built using a particular tech  That sometimes works

User · Answer

Go to Netcraft and use the  What s that site running   search box in the top left corner  Click here for the report on Stack Overflow  It won t necessarily be correct  e g   there could be caching or load balancing in the way   but it often gives you the clue you need

User · Answer

yes there are some telltale signs for common CMSs like Drupal  Joomla  Pligg   and RoR etc        ASP NET stuff is easy to spot too    but as the framework becomes more obscure it gets harder to deduce      What I usually is compare the site i am snooping with another site that I know is built using a particular tech  That sometimes works

User · Answer

There is also W3Techs  which shows you much of that information

User · Answer

URLs can give a lot of clues  especially with Content Management Systems   For example  http   abcxyz com node 46  looks a lot like Drupal   Also many frameworks have standard JavaScript and CSS files they use

User · Answer

Some people might even deliberately obscure the technology they use  After all  it wouldn t take me long to tweak apache so that   asp  actually ran perl scripts and put  powered by Microsoft IIS  into my footer despite the fact I used MySQL   That way you d spend all your time trying to hack my site using vulnerabilities it doesn t actually have

User · Answer

Examining the cookies the site gives can reveal the underlying framework   CodeIgniter  for example defaults to a telltale ci sessions cookie   Sites using PEAR Auth will do something similar

User · Answer

You could use http   builtwith com to figure out which server and programming language was used  For example it told me that SO uses IIS7  google analytics  html4 and utf8   If you want to know the framework   well that will probably not be possible just from looking at the site  Why don t you write them an email

User · Answer

There are all sorts of things you can look out for  but it doesn t really give you any certainty as to the technology behind a site  In general  information like that is something people will want to hide  as the more information that is exposed the easier it might be for malicious parties to identify security vulnerabilities or denial of service holes   If I was interested I d probably look  in no particular order  at    urls  and file extensions  HTTP response headers Source code for comments  or standard JS libraries   Incidentally  the tools mentioned in other answers are only looking at some of the above properties of the site for you  albeit automatically  and slightly quicker

User · Answer

Go to Netcraft and use the  What s that site running   search box in the top left corner  Click here for the report on Stack Overflow  It won t necessarily be correct  e g   there could be caching or load balancing in the way   but it often gives you the clue you need

User · Answer

You could use http   builtwith com to figure out which server and programming language was used  For example it told me that SO uses IIS7  google analytics  html4 and utf8   If you want to know the framework   well that will probably not be possible just from looking at the site  Why don t you write them an email

User · Answer

Examining the cookies the site gives can reveal the underlying framework   CodeIgniter  for example defaults to a telltale ci sessions cookie   Sites using PEAR Auth will do something similar

User · Answer

http   www quarkbase com  is a very nice tool and information website

User · Answer

You can use domaintools com to lookup the server information for a website and narrow down to whether it s open source   Microsoft   http   whois domaintools com stackoverflow com  And after that it s a matter of looking in the footer for tip-offs such as  Powered by WordPress  or  vBulletin   etc

User · Answer

http   www quarkbase com  is a very nice tool and information website

User · Answer

You could use http   builtwith com to figure out which server and programming language was used  For example it told me that SO uses IIS7  google analytics  html4 and utf8   If you want to know the framework   well that will probably not be possible just from looking at the site  Why don t you write them an email

User · Answer

Some people might even deliberately obscure the technology they use  After all  it wouldn t take me long to tweak apache so that   asp  actually ran perl scripts and put  powered by Microsoft IIS  into my footer despite the fact I used MySQL   That way you d spend all your time trying to hack my site using vulnerabilities it doesn t actually have

User · Answer

There is also W3Techs  which shows you much of that information

User · Answer

You can use domaintools com to lookup the server information for a website and narrow down to whether it s open source   Microsoft   http   whois domaintools com stackoverflow com  And after that it s a matter of looking in the footer for tip-offs such as  Powered by WordPress  or  vBulletin   etc

User · Answer

You could use http   builtbased com  to figure out which server  framework and programming language was used

User · Answer

http   guess scritch org  does this for CMSs   Just pop in the URL and it ll try to guess the CMS  In this case it tells me my blog is running wordpress 3 4 2  which is correct  I just checked

User · Answer

Some people might even deliberately obscure the technology they use  After all  it wouldn t take me long to tweak apache so that   asp  actually ran perl scripts and put  powered by Microsoft IIS  into my footer despite the fact I used MySQL   That way you d spend all your time trying to hack my site using vulnerabilities it doesn t actually have

User · Answer

I use 1 plug in for Firefox that gives me the IP and country for the hosting website and it s Web Server name called Domain Details  and for javascript framework I use WTFramework  I still need to wonder what script it was written on  but it is a start     Hope it helps   P S  the output will be something like this   alt text http   img88 imageshack us img88 2505 200812282328ha0 png

User · Answer

I use 1 plug in for Firefox that gives me the IP and country for the hosting website and it s Web Server name called Domain Details  and for javascript framework I use WTFramework  I still need to wonder what script it was written on  but it is a start     Hope it helps   P S  the output will be something like this   alt text http   img88 imageshack us img88 2505 200812282328ha0 png

User · Answer

In Linux OSX I often use simple command curl -sI www site com

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