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

Try to navigate to some 404 error page, or something of that sort. Chances are slim, but try to find a default django error page.

You can also try to login to www.website.com/admin and see if you get the default django admin page.

Other than that, if that didn't work, then you just can't.

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

Answer 3

There are no reliable indicators to my knowledge but you could check the /admin/ URL to see if you get the standard admin app or sometimes the feed-URLs use a common prefix compared to a common suffix (although this might not be an indicator at all but just a preference of the developers).

Trying to trigger a debug page (either via a 404 or using some broken input that might case an internal error) might also be a good way (although this acts more as a test of competency of the original developers and admin than anything else :-) )

Answer 4

Could you ask the airline and / or the furniture store? I'm guessing that you want to know if this company has good experience in django, I think it is reasonable to ask for references if you are considering working with them.

The other companies may be quite happy to discuss what technologies were used - some are and some aren't, but it's worth asking.

Answer 5

Navigate to a page with a formset, and check if there are *-TOTAL_FORMS or *-DELETE hidden inputs. That doesn't prove that they are using Django, but might be a clue that they are (with the mentioned model formsets).