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):
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:
Bookmarklets:
- WTFramework – shows Javascript framework in use
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:
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. 🙂