How To Detect Technology Used In A Website

There are some website tools that provide the functions to let you detect the technologies that are used in a target website, but those tools are not free. If you know a little more about python language, you can use the python builtwith module to implement the same function. This article will tell you how to use the python builtwith module to detect a target website used technologies.

1. How To Use Python builtwith Module To Detect Technology Used In A Website.

1.1 Install Python builtwith Module.

1. Open a terminal and run the command pip show builtwith to check whether the python module has been installed or not. If you get the below output that means the python module has not been installed.

   $ pip show builtwith
   WARNING: Package(s) not found: builtwith
   

2. Then run the command pip install builtwith to install the python builtwith module like below.

   $ pip install builtwith
   Collecting builtwith
     Downloading builtwith-1.3.4.tar.gz (34 kB)
     Preparing metadata (setup.py) ... done
   Requirement already satisfied: six in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages (from builtwith) (1.15.0)
   Using legacy 'setup.py install' for builtwith, since package 'wheel' is not installed.
   Installing collected packages: builtwith
       Running setup.py install for builtwith ... done
   Successfully installed builtwith-1.3.4

3. Run the command pip show builtwith to verify the installation. We can get the python builtwith module installed directory from the output Location property value as below.

   $ pip show builtwith
   Name: builtwith
   Version: 1.3.4
   Summary: Detect the technology used by a website, such as Apache, JQuery, and WordPress.
   Home-page: https://github.com/richardpenman/builtwith
   Author: Richard Penman
   Author-email: [email protected]
   License: lgpl
   Location: /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages
   Requires: six
   Required-by:

4. We can see the python builtwith module source files are saved in the directory /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages/builtwith.
5. You can see the module source code in the __init__.py file in the above directory.

1.2 How To Use Python builtwith Module To Detect Technology Used In A Website.

1. Open a terminal and run the command python to go to the python interactive console. My python version is 3.7.

   $ python
   Python 3.7.3 (v3.7.3:ef4ec6ed12, Mar 25 2019, 16:52:21) 
   [Clang 6.0 (clang-600.0.57)] on darwin
   Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
   

2. Import the python builtwith module as below.

   >>> import builtwith
   

3. Now you can run the command builtwith.parse(‘http://www.dev2qa.com’) or builtwith.builtwith(‘http://www.dev2qa.com’) to detect the technologies used in the website http://www.dev2qa.com.

   >>> builtwith.parse('http://www.dev2qa.com')
   {'cdn': ['CloudFlare'], 'analytics': ['Clicky'], 'advertising-networks': ['Google AdSense'], 'javascript-frameworks': ['Prototype', 'React', 'RequireJS', 'jQuery'], 'web-frameworks': ['Twitter Bootstrap'], 'ecommerce': ['WooCommerce'], 'cms': ['WordPress'], 'programming-languages': ['PHP'], 'blogs': ['PHP', 'WordPress']}

References

1. How To Install Python/Pip On Windows.