Heroku
Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages.
What detecting Heroku tells you about a site
Heroku is the original developer-friendly PaaS, and you typically infer it from a herokuapp.com hostname before a custom domain is attached, sometimes paired with a Via header referencing its routing layer or a Server: Cowboy line from its Erlang router. Detecting it is increasingly a tell of legacy or early-stage simplicity: Heroku's git-push-to-deploy model made it the default for prototypes and startups for years, so its presence suggests an app that valued zero-ops deployment over cost optimisation, possibly one that has been running for a while.
Heroku in a real-world stack
When you find Heroku, it rarely travels alone. Classic home of Rails and Django apps with a Heroku Postgres add-on; often fronted by a CDN once traffic grows.
About
Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages.
Categories: PaaS
Quick facts
Detection methodology for PaaS
Platform-as-a-Service offerings show up as response headers and deployment domains. Heroku's `Server: Cowboy` plus `*.herokuapp.com`; Render's `*.onrender.com`; Fly.io's `*.fly.dev`. We pair the host detection with framework signals so you can tell what's running on the platform — a Heroku dyno serving Rails looks very different from a Heroku dyno serving Node, even though both fit the same hosting fingerprint.
How we detect Heroku
Sourcemap Explorer carries 2 fingerprint signals for Heroku, spread across 2 channels — response header and url pattern. The exact patterns are listed below, and you can replay each one in Chrome DevTools to confirm a match by hand.
Each signal alone is rarely conclusive — Sourcemap Explorer cross-references all of them and weights by confidence. You can reproduce any of these checks yourself in Chrome DevTools.
Server-side fingerprint: the response header reveals the technology behind the page. Visible in DevTools → Network → response headers.
Via: [\d.-]+ vegur$
The page URL itself follows a known pattern (vanity slugs, embeds, hosting URLs).
\.herokuapp\.com
FAQ
How do I check if a website is using Heroku?
Open the page in Chrome, click the Sourcemap Explorer toolbar icon, and read the Stack tab. Heroku's specific fingerprints here are response header and url pattern, and the popup flags Heroku whenever any combination of them is found. The same checks can be reproduced manually in DevTools — see the "How we detect" section above.
What Heroku version can Sourcemap Explorer detect?
Heroku ships as a hosted paas rather than a bundled npm package, so version-specific detection isn't always possible. Where the platform leaks a version in response headers (`X-Powered-By`, `Server`, generator meta tags) we surface it; otherwise we report presence only.
Where can I read more about Heroku?
Official site: https://www.heroku.com/. For Sourcemap Explorer's detection guide, see the deep-dive link below or the related guides in the cross-link section.
Keep reading on Sourcemap Explorer
Alternative tools
Detected by Sourcemap Explorer
Open the popup on any page running Herokuand you'll see the exact version pulled from the bundled package.json when sourcemaps are exposed.