Download websites that use CodeIgniter

About CodeIgniter

Backend frameworks are the hardest thing to see from outside a website, because the code that renders a page usually leaves no signature in the page it produced. CodeIgniter is a clean case of the problem. The framework is written in PHP, published under MIT and first released in 2006, and it does its work entirely on the server, so the only evidence available to a crawler is whatever the application forgot to hide.

Detection here rests on side effects. Session cookie names, characteristic URL structures, default error output, ordering of response headers and the occasional untouched default asset are the kinds of artefact that give the framework away. A team that renames its session cookie, routes cleanly and returns custom error pages disappears from the data entirely while still running the framework. The count that follows should be read as a lower bound, and a soft one. Anyone using this list needs to know that absence proves nothing.

As of September 2026 we identify the framework on 184,847 sites, with 63,238 attributed to United States and .com common among the domain endings. Version information is coarse for the same structural reason, because a server side framework does not announce its release number to visitors, and what we can read amounts to a broad line such as 2+ rather than a precise build. Treat the version field here as a hint about generation, not as a patch level you could act on directly.

What survives all that caution is still worth something, because the framework itself carries a distinctive profile. Small, fast and light on ceremony, it was adopted heavily by independent shops, in house teams and regional development agencies building line of business applications, portals and custom commerce on a modest budget. Projects of that shape are long lived, rarely rewritten and usually maintained by whoever built them, which makes the detected population unusually rich in owner operated business software rather than marketing sites.

Different buyers use that profile differently. Recruiting and outsourcing firms use it to find the companies and agencies that still run this part of the ecosystem. Security researchers use it because an older generation application framework running on a public host is a category worth studying at scale. Migration and modernisation vendors use it to find applications built years ago on a stack whose original developer has often moved on.

The one thing to avoid is treating any single row as authoritative. A lookup on one domain, against a detection this inferential, is the weakest possible use of the data, since a miss might mean the framework is absent or might mean the developer simply configured things tidily. Aggregate use is where the signal stabilises. Across a large population, the artefacts that leak appear often enough to make the shape of the group meaningful even though individual rows are uncertain, and the downloadable file is what lets you work at that level, joining the framework flag to country, domain ending, server software and the rest of each stack.