How do you determine what technology a website is built on? [closed]

Answer 1

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].

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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!)

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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.