How can you tell if a site has been made with Django?

Question

A company I'm looking at claims to have made the website for an airline and a furniture store using Django, but when I look at the sites, there is no indication what the underlying web technology is. How can you tell?

Answer 1

This is quite an old question, but I don't see any canonical answers. As the other answers have noted though, there's no sure-fire way to know, and if someone wanted to hide the fact that they're using Django, they can. That said, you can always do a little detective-work and determine with some confidence whether it uses Django or not. If that's your goal, here are some strong indicators you can look out for:

Admin Panel

First and foremost, check if the site has a /admin/ page. If it does, and it gives that familiar Django admin login page, you're 99% sure (unless someone went through a lot of trouble to make it look like Django).

Forms

There are a number of things you can look out for in forms:

• Form fields with id attributes starting with id_
• Check for a hidden field with the name csrfmiddlewaretoken
• If the site has a formset, check for -TOTAL-FORMS and -DELETE hidden inputs.

Cookies

• If the site uses the contrib.auth package for authentication, you will probably see a cookie called sessionid being set when you log in.
• Forms will also probably set a cookie called csrftoken.

Trailing Slashes

Trailing slashes after URLs, and/or redirecting you to the page with a trailing slash if you try to go to one without it. This is Django's default behavior, and to my knowledge not extremely common in other frameworks. Note, though, that it can be easily deactivated in Django.

Error Pages

Failing all this, or still not being convinced, you can try to force error pages, and try to learn something from that. Go to an unmapped URL with a 404 page, and see if DEBUG still happens to be true (in which case you should probably notify the owner that they're not being very secure about their site).

Answer 2

You can try a few things, such as attempting to find error pages, and checking the default location of the administration panel that Django creates, but overall there's no way to determine what technologies a given site is using.

See also: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/563316/is-there-a-generic-way-to-see-what-is-a-website-running-on/563335#563335