GlobalPulse

A live map of what is happening in the world. It pulls news and alert feeds, sorts each headline into a category, pins it to a country, and shows everything on a satellite map that refreshes by itself.

Live: https://globalpulse-mdmw.onrender.com (free hosting, the first visit can take about a minute to wake up)

Why I built it

News is scattered across dozens of sites. I wanted one screen where I could see conflicts, disasters, cyber incidents and politics at the same time, by place, without an account or an API key.

What it does

• Satellite, hybrid and street map (Esri imagery through Leaflet), with clustered markers.
• 40+ feeds read every 5 minutes: world news, security, disaster and cyber sources.
• Auto sorting of headlines into Conflict, Disaster, Cyber, Political and News using keyword rules.
• Auto pinning: the country named in a headline is looked up with Nominatim and placed on the map.
• Filters and search by category, severity, time range and text.
• Custom alerts: save a rule and get notified when a matching event arrives.
• Live push: new events reach open browsers over SignalR.
• Dark and light theme, and a layout that works on a phone.
• Demo mode: with no database configured it still runs on sample data.

How the pieces fit

Browser (HTML, CSS, JS, Leaflet)
   |  REST + SignalR
   v
ASP.NET Core 9
   |- FeedIngestionService   reads the feeds on a timer, classifies, geocodes
   |- EventsHub              pushes new events to clients
   '- minimal API            /api/events, /api/events/stats, /api/alerts, /api/feeds, /api/health
   |
   v
PostgreSQL   tables: events, alert_rules, feed_sources

The frontend is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript in backend/wwwroot. There is no build step.

Run it locally

You need the .NET 9 SDK.

git clone https://github.com/atharvpawar16/GlobalPulse.git
cd GlobalPulse
dotnet run --project backend/GlobalPulse.Api.csproj

Open http://localhost:5164. It starts in demo mode.

To use a real database, set ConnectionStrings__Postgres to a PostgreSQL connection string (a free Neon database works). The tables are created on startup; infra/db/init.sql holds the same schema. docker-compose.yml is there for a container setup.

Folders

backend/       API, services, SignalR hub, models, Dockerfile
backend/wwwroot/   the whole frontend
infra/db/      database schema
infra/nginx/   nginx config
.github/       CI workflow, issue and PR templates
docs/          screenshot

Contributing and security

See CONTRIBUTING.md and SECURITY.md.

License

MIT (c) 2026 Atharv Pawar