Prevent exposing Laravel usage

Question

I use Wappalyzer add-on on chrome and recently it started finding out about the usage of Laravel framework on my projects.

how does it know about this and how can I hide this?

I think it may be because of one of the cookie's name that Laravel sets automatically, but have no idea how can I change it's name.

Cookie Name: laravel_session

EDIT: thanks to David's answer I could change cookie's name but it still tracks Laravel, so it shouldn't be the way Wappalyzer finds out about Laravel.

EDIT2: I've created a new controller and it didn't detect the framework! It seems that Wappalyzer caches the results for each URL!

Answer 1

It's probably the laravel cookie. It has a distinguishing feature in it's name 'laravel_session'. It would certainly explain where it gets the usage stats from. You can change the name of the cookie in app/config/session.php.

Edit

So Wappalyzer uses json to specify what it should be looking for. This is how it identifies Laravel:

"Laravel": {
    "website": "laravel.com",
    "cats": [ 18 ],
    "headers": { "Set-Cookie": "laravel_session" },
    "implies": "PHP"
}

It uses the headers property to identify what's going on. This would imply it does use the cookie name only...

For the complete list of app tracking rules, they're on the GitHub repo.

Answer 2

When requesting the laravel website for the first time with the laravel_session prefix while the detection plugin is running, Laravel website techs are detected and stored, so in the next time even if you've changed the prefix the laravel detected icon will still showup.

Best thing is to not ever activate the plugin while developing on the production server, and make sure to uncheck in plugin options the "send data to the server".

Answer 3

In the new laravel 5.2, you can change the cookie session name

By going to the config folder in the root of your laravel project and then session.php, scroll down till line 112 and change this from 'cookie' => 'laravel_session', to w.e you want.

Answer 4

In laravel 5.7 and 5.8

If you want to hide it from Wapplyzer than you can change it in below way.

Change APP_NAME=Laravel to APP_NAME=Any Name You want in .env file.