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

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

Posted 2009-11-18T15:17:42.587

Reputation: 8 283

Answers

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

ale

Posted 2009-11-18T15:17:42.587

Reputation: 3 159

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

– jrh – 2019-07-31T13:04:21.167

Aha! I already have the Web Dev toolbar installed but hadn't noticed that menu item. Thanks. – pelms – 2009-11-18T17:15:12.897

Always happy to help. – ale – 2009-11-18T18:28:54.153

Good answer, but it won't show the operating system (unless the web server includes that), does it? – Arjan – 2009-11-18T18:39:00.810

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? – ale – 2009-11-18T19:15:06.507

Well, there's more than one flavour of Windows ;-) And for some installations the response headers just return "Apache" (like for http://rubyforge.org) or "nginx" (like for http://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 http://twitter.com is using...)

– Arjan – 2009-11-18T20:48:57.020

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).}

Arjan

Posted 2009-11-18T15:17:42.587

Reputation: 29 084

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 – 2009-11-18T17:26:38.007

Ah, just seen your other link re. OS detection... – pelms – 2009-11-18T17:28:11.887

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.

Cauliflower

Posted 2009-11-18T15:17:42.587

Reputation: 1

He asked "from the browser". curl is a command line utility. – Catalyst – 2017-07-17T14:47:03.600

I think this is still relevant information for anyone who views this thread and is looking for something similar. – Cauliflower – 2017-07-18T15:27:07.937

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.

pelms

Posted 2009-11-18T15:17:42.587

Reputation: 8 283