How to tell in what language a site was written at

Shaye87 · 9 Feb 2009 at 08:42

Hi
If there is a site without a suffix in all of its pages, such as .php, .html, .aspx and so on, how can I tell in what language the site was written at?
Right click - page source, only confused me more as i couldn't find anything other than html code...

Thanks

hargi · 9 Feb 2009 at 08:51

can you post the link to the site?

Pho · 9 Feb 2009 at 08:54

You could always try accessing index.php / index.asp / index.aspx and seeing if any of those work.. though, they could have changed .asp to actually be loaded as a .php but that would be silly.

Shaye87 · 9 Feb 2009 at 09:06

can you post the link to the site?

there is no specific site that i am on about really, just more of a general question as there are so many websites like that on the internet.

You could always try accessing index.php / index.asp / index.aspx and seeing if any of those work.. though, they could have changed .asp to actually be loaded as a .php but that would be silly.

Thanks,
Any other ideas to be 100% sure? There's gotta be.

Pho · 9 Feb 2009 at 09:23

Not really. ASP/PHP etc are executed and their results are sent back to the user, when you view the page source you only see their output and not the ASP/PHP source-code.

You could always type the site into http://www.netcraft.com/whats - if it's running Apache it's likely going to be PHP. If it's IIS (Microsoft's web server) it could be either ASP or PHP but most probably ASP.

Another option might be to try and cause an error on the site so it gives you the error from the scirpting language, but on a well programmed site you won't ever see that.

Ciphon · 9 Feb 2009 at 09:34

There is a website called "Made With" or something similar that tells you this sort of thing..

Dj_Jestar · 9 Feb 2009 at 09:51

There are smells that most people leave behind to give it away, but no guaranteed way to tell.

MagicalTrevor · 9 Feb 2009 at 10:21

The website could be using something like a servlet... there could be a background program that is generating the pages on demand based on the url rather than the pages being actually physically there.

philjohn · 9 Feb 2009 at 11:41

A good way of telling ASP.NET is looking for a hidden field called "_VIEWSTATE".

Napaim · 9 Feb 2009 at 12:15

maybe look in robots.txt to see if anything has been disallowed, nmap and curl might have something in them to make educated guesses as well.

Inquisitor · 9 Feb 2009 at 12:51

Check the HTTP headers that the server sends you. Depending on the server configuration, you may get something like this:

Code:

Server: Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) PHP/4.4.7 mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.7e mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 DAV/2 SVN/1.4.2

It's entirely possible the server will be configured not to divulge such information though.