Download websites that use Handlebars

About Handlebars

The name is a joke about punctuation. Handlebars extends Mustache, a template syntax named for the curly braces that wrap its tags and look like a moustache lying on its side, and the fork took the fancier moustache for its own name. What the joke hides is that hardly any of the sites carrying Handlebars chose it. A templating engine is a dependency of other things, pulled in by a framework, a component library, an analytics widget or a purchased theme, and it ends up in delivered pages because something above it needed a way to turn data into markup. The fingerprint is a statement about how a site was assembled rather than about what its developers preferred.

As of September 2026 the library appears on 200,721 sites. Released in 2010 under MIT and written in JavaScript, it belongs to the generation of tools that solved rendering before frameworks absorbed the problem, and it survived because its syntax is easy to read, easy to embed and stable enough that upgrading brings no visible benefit to anyone.

Version data is where this entry earns its place in a dataset. We record 41 distinct releases in circulation and the release we see most often is 4.0.5, which predates most current front end tooling by a wide margin. A spread that wide across one small library is not the signature of teams tracking upstream. The spread is what happens when a version is frozen at the moment a theme was sold, a plugin was published or a build was last run, and then shipped unchanged to every site that installed it afterwards.

For security research the version column is the whole point. Older releases of the engine have documented issues around template compilation and prototype handling, and whether a given site is exposed depends entirely on which release it froze at. A list of domains running the library is mildly interesting. A list of domains running the library at a known release is an assessment target, and the version field is what turns one into the other.

Distribution behaves like a dependency rather than a product. The country column puts United States at 130,886 sites and the suffix column is concentrated in .com, which tracks the reach of the packages that bundle the engine rather than any regional preference for it.

The count should be read as a floor, and the reason is mechanical. When the engine is compiled into a bundle during a build, the recognisable runtime often disappears into minified code, so the sites using it in the most disciplined way are exactly the ones where detection fails. Visible installations lean towards pages that load the library as a separate file, which means the measurable population is older and simpler than the real one. With that caveat granted, the extract still answers what a per domain lookup cannot. Asking about one address returns a yes or a no. The downloadable set returns the version distribution across the entire detected population, filterable by country, suffix and co installed software, which is what dependency research, vulnerability triage and ecosystem analysis actually require.