Download websites that use Hogan.js

About Hogan.js

Templating engines are usually invisible in a technology profile, because they do their work at build time and leave nothing behind in the delivered page. Hogan.js is an exception worth reading carefully. The compiler turns Mustache templates into plain JavaScript functions, and the runtime it needs is small enough that projects ship it inside their own bundles instead of loading it from a shared source.

The library came out of Twitter under an Apache 2.0 license, with 2011 as the earliest year in our records. A release of that vintage predates the component frameworks that now dominate front end work, so a site still serving it is either running code written in that era or depending on a package that has not been rebuilt since.

Origin matters for a library in this position. Code released by a large platform company tends to spread through the ecosystem rather than through its author, picked up by other teams solving the same problem and then embedded in the tools those teams shipped onward. A logic less template format is deliberately portable as well, designed so that one template renders identically on the server and in the browser, and portability of that kind is exactly what gets a library bundled into somebody else's product instead of chosen on its own merits.

Version data supports the second reading. We record 5 distinct versions across the sites where we detect it, a narrow spread for a library that has been in circulation this long, and 3 is the build that keeps recurring. Libraries under active maintenance fragment instead, because every project upgrades on its own schedule and old releases linger for years. A narrow, repetitive spread points the other way: the code is arriving pre packaged inside something a site installed for another reason, such as a widget, a purchased theme or a vendor SDK, and nobody has had cause to move it.

For a researcher that changes which question the data can answer. If you are tracking framework adoption, a compiled template engine is a weak signal, because a build step can hide it completely and the sites that do expose it are often exposing somebody else's dependency rather than their own choice. If you are doing dependency archaeology, the same property is the whole point. A page that still serves this file is a page whose front end assets have a datable age, and asset age is what security teams, acquisition diligence teams and modernization consultancies are usually trying to establish.

As of October 2026 the fingerprint matches on 31 sites. Counts at that scale belong at the bottom of the range rather than the top, since minification, bundling and renaming all remove the library from view without removing it from the page. What a downloadable list adds over a per domain lookup is the ability to work backwards. Instead of asking what a known site runs, you can take the set whole, intersect it with the widgets and themes you already track, and find out which upstream package is quietly carrying an aging JavaScript dependency onto every site that installs it.