Daybreak

Daybreak is a self-hosted security news aggregator for fast daily monitoring. It combines curated security headlines, ransomware activity, and CVE updates in one server-rendered dashboard.

At A Glance

Item	Value
Stack	PHP 8.3, MariaDB 10.11+, Apache 2.4
Rendering model	Server-rendered templates (no SPA build pipeline)
Public pages	Feed, Sources analytics, legal pages
Authenticated pages	Personal feed, source preferences, account settings, source suggestions
Admin pages	Source management, moderation queue, feed health, user admin, audit log
Adapters	rss_atom, json_api, ransomlook, nvd

Quick Links

• Specification: docs/SPEC.md
• Implementation plan: docs/IMPLEMENTATION.md
• Apache vhost example: deploy/apache-vhost.conf
• Test runner: tests/run.php

Core Features

Public experience

• Main feed with category and time-window filtering
• Sources analytics page
• Ransomware activity widget
• CVE widget with severity cues
• Legal pages (Imprint, Terms, Privacy)

User experience

• Registration and email verification
• Login, password reset, account settings
• Source preference management
• Personalized feed behavior
• Source suggestion submission

Admin experience

• Source CRUD and fetch controls
• Suggestion moderation queue
• Feed health and operations dashboard
• User administration and audit log

Security Highlights

• Prepared statements for database access
• CSRF checks on state-changing requests
• SSRF-safe outbound fetching via guarded fetcher
• Sanitized feed summaries and escaped output
• Strict security headers on responses

Quick Start

cp config/.env.example config/.env
# then edit DB and SMTP settings in config/.env

# create DB and least-privileged DB user first, then:
php migrations/run.php
php bin/fetch.php --force
php bin/prune.php

# configure Apache DocumentRoot to public/
# see deploy/apache-vhost.conf

Runtime Commands

Initial/Manual fetch:

php bin/fetch.php --force

Manual maintenance prune:

php bin/prune.php

Cron (every 5 minutes):

*/5 * * * * php /srv/vhosts/daybreak.silverday.de/bin/fetch.php

Maintenance cron (daily at 03:00):

0 3 * * * php /srv/vhosts/daybreak.silverday.de/bin/prune.php

Run tests:

php tests/run.php

CI Notes

GitHub Actions runs:

• php tests/run.php
• php -l for bin/, public/, src/, and tests/

Attribution

Ransomlook data is sourced from ransomlook.io and attributed in the UI under CC BY 4.0.