How do I find the version of Apache running without access to the command line?
The method
Connect to port 80 on the host and send it
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
This needs to be followed by carriage-return + line-feed twice
You'll get back something like this
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:39:43 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Ubuntu) DAV/2 SVN/1.5.0 PHP/5.2.6-1ubuntu4 with Suhosin-Patch mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.0
Last-Modified: Thu, 02 Aug 2007 20:50:09 GMT
ETag: "438118-197-436bd96872240"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 407
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
You can then extract the apache version from the Server: header
Typical tools you can use
You could use the HEAD utility which comes with a full install of Perl's LWP library, e.g.
HEAD http://your.webserver.com/
Or, use the curl utility, e.g.
curl --head http://your.webserver.com/
You could also use a browser extension which lets you view server headers, such as Live HTTP Headers or Firebug for Firefox, or Fiddler for IE
Stuck with Windows?
Finally. if you're on Windows, and have nothing else at your disposal, open a command prompt (Start Menu->Run, type "cmd" and press return), and then type this
telnet your.webserver.com 80
Then type (carefully, your characters won't be echoed back)
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
Press return twice and you'll see the server headers.
Other methods
As mentioned by cfeduke and Veynom, the server may be set to return limited information in the Server: header. Try and upload a PHP script to your host with this in it
<?php phpinfo() ?>
Request the page with a web browser and you should see the Apache version reported there.
You could also try and use PHPShell to have a poke around, try a command like
/usr/sbin/apache2 -V
httpd -v will give you the version of Apache running on your server (if you have SSH/shell access).
The output should be something like this:
Server version: Apache/2.2.3
Server built: Oct 20 2011 17:00:12
As has been suggested you can also do apachectl -v which will give you the same output, but will be supported by more flavours of Linux.
Warning, some Apache servers do not always send their version number when using HEAD, like in this case:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:09:45 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6RC4-pl0-gentoo
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=a97a60f86539b5502ad1109f6759585c; path=/
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Connection to host lost.
If PHP is installed then indeed, just use the php info command:
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
Rarely, a hardened HTTP server is configured to give no server information or misleading server information. In those scenarios if the server has PHP enabled you can add:
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
in a file and browse to it and look for the
_SERVER["SERVER_SOFTWARE"]
entry. This is susceptible to the same hardening lack of information/misleading though I would imagine that it's not altered often, because this method first requires access to the machine to create the PHP file.