Stacks-cli: Analyze a website’s stack from the terminal | Hacker News Reader

Stacks-cli: Analyze a website’s stack from the terminal

github.com

116 pointsgoldxfive16 comments

There is also another reason to use this over an extension: privacy. Last I saw the browser extensions worked automatically for all pages, thus sending all your browsing habits to some random place. Quite serious if you ask me.

That said, they may have changed or I may have missed extensions that aren't pervasive.

Awesome work! Thanks!

Most extensions do work that way, but if privacy or resource-draining background processes are a concern you should check out sitestacks.com - the crawl is only run on command and from the SiteStacks servers.

It's a wrapper over wappalyzer which is a chrome extension, why would this avoid sending your data to wappalyzer servers?

Presumably it does the same thing, sure, but isn't active on every page you visit, only those you drop into a shell and run it against. So it gives you the same sort of results without having to enable and disable the extension in the browser.

> Last I saw the browser extensions worked automatically for all pages, thus sending all your browsing habits to some random place

You're right that when a extension want to work when the current tab and site you have in focus, they'll need to ask for permission to all websites (otherwise the developer would have to whitelist all the websites where the extension should work) but that doesn't mean that they are sending your browser habits anywhere. Although they could, so review the source code if possible.

There is also https://github.com/rverton/webanalyze which is a Go port of Wappalyzer. It makes use of the Wappalyzer apps.json definition file.

Author himself points to Wappalyzer himself which does the same thing, either as a service or a Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wappalyzer/gppongm... / https://www.wappalyzer.com/

Author also uses Wappalyzer data. The CLI is basically few lines of code.

Hello, I'm the author of stacks-cli,and yes just like you said, stacks-cli just another tool based on wappalyzer this npm module and was a side project of mine built in my spare time, but I think the most important core value of stacks-cli is that you can still have another options when choosing tools. I mean you can choose to install browser extension or just installing stacks-cli. For my situation, there's two reasons, the first one is that I don't wanna too many redundant extensions in my browser especially Chrome already ate too many RAM of my laptop. The other one is I'm a CLI lover, just that simple.

I don't mind, enjoy doing what you want. Is it worth posting on HN, I'm not sure, but let that be your decision too. Cheers.

First line in README is a bit misleading IMO - it implies that this tool has been built as an alternative to Wappalyzer, but it's actually using the Wappalyzer Node module (https://www.npmjs.com/package/wappalyzer). Maybe naming it `wappalyzer-cli` would make more sense.

I just use BuiltWith.com for this.

Are javascript runtime dependencies considered part of "the stack"?

What is with the trend to stuff emojis everywhere? It looks childish and does not improve readability at all.

How is it childish?

It is the same reason, why I don't like when companies use buzzwords like "code ninjas" instead of "developers" in their job listings. This gives me an impression, that you think I'm incapable of understanding basic words and terms and you need to describe it with images and pop references for me, which is weird because these kind of articles are usually oriented towards tech savvy people and not general public. And/Or you are trying to look very "hip" and "cool", which is not a bad thing, but I find it a little bit annoying. This is job offer/github app, not your Tinder bio.

Finally, in this specific case the use of emojis is so over the top it distracts me from the actual content.

I'm generally all for fun, but this feels like insulting the reader's intelligence to me.

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