How can I get web server information about a page I'm viewing (e.g. Apache or IIS, Windows or UNIX)?

browser apache-http-server webserver iis

27,194

Solution 1

The Web Developer toolbar for Firefox has among its many options a way to view page response headers. (Information | View Response Headers)

Solution 2

curl -I yoursite.com is another simple way to at least see what kind of server it is as well as some other basic header information.

Solution 3

Or from Chrome Dev Tools

Network > All > Headers

Refresh the page then click the site name at the top of the list in the 'Name' panel and look at the Response Headers:
Though for security, fewer and fewer sites include this information nowadays.

Solution 4

The information you mention seems the same as Netcraft's "What's that site running" provides, and they actually have a toolbar (which I've never used). Still note that this information is not by definition The Truth; a web server can report anything it likes.

Also, it's just never as complete^† as the real story.

^{^† I didn't know IIS could run on Linux? Ah, Jeff says some parts of SO are Linux, like the load balancer (HAProxy).}

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27,194

pelms

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

pelms over 1 year
When I check pages for broken links using Xenu's Link Sleuth it usefully lists information about the web server, OS and PHP version
e.g.
```
Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8j PHP5.2.9
```
Is there a simple way to extract similar information from the browser when viewing a page e.g. by a Javascript snippet/bookmarklet?

Update
The server information is part of the HTTP response header which is not accessible to Javascript. So a Javascript/bookmarklet solution would not be directly possible (though it could do something like sending the page URL to a site like Arjan's below).
pelms over 14 years

Aha! I already have the Web Dev toolbar installed but hadn't noticed that menu item. Thanks.
pelms over 14 years

Re: stackoverflow.com. Strange, the header just reports 'Microsoft-IIS/7.0'. I wonder where Netcraft gets the OS from. Is this a virtual machine thing???
pelms over 14 years

Ah, just seen your other link re. OS detection...
ale over 14 years

Always happy to help.
Arjan over 14 years

Good answer, but it won't show the operating system (unless the web server includes that), does it?
ale over 14 years

Probably. It might require some inference. superuser.com returns "Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0" as one of the values. IIS 7 implies Windows Server 2008, does it not?
Arjan over 14 years

Well, there's more than one flavour of Windows ;-) And for some installations the response headers just return "Apache" (like for rubyforge.org) or "nginx" (like for gravatar.com). (But I guess the question asker doesn't really care about that; using the Developer Toolbar surely is an easy way to get some information. And neither the response headers nor Netcraft can figger out what twitter.com is using...)
Catalyst almost 7 years

He asked "from the browser". curl is a command line utility.
Cauliflower almost 7 years

I think this is still relevant information for anyone who views this thread and is looking for something similar.
jrh almost 5 years

The link for Web Developer Tools seems to be dead, is this new one equivalent?