The Daily Brief — template

A personalized morning news briefing, generated end-to-end by GitHub Actions: web research across your configured sources, Claude-written synthesis, a styled HTML brief, optional text-to-speech audio, and email delivery — in your inbox before you wake up.

This is the template (public) edition of a running personal deployment. Everything personal — recipient, sender domain, weather locations, calendar, reading queue — enters through Actions secrets and environment variables, never through committed files. Fork it, set your secrets, and it runs.

What it does

Every scheduled run the pipeline:

1. Checks your calendar (CALENDAR_ICS_URL) to find your local timezone and only proceeds at your configured hour, wherever you are.
2. Researches each source/category in config.json within a word budget.
3. Writes the brief with the Anthropic API, runs it through a prose-quality linter (brief_quality.py), and renders templates/brief_template.html.
4. Optionally narrates it to MP3 (Deepgram) and commits the audio so the email can link it.
5. Emails the result (Resend) to RECIPIENT_EMAILS.

A "Deep Dive" section can surface your reading/listening queue — it is read from a private store via PERSONAL_DATA_DIR and is stripped from anything committed to the repo. Never track personal queue state in a public repo; the parent project once did, and un-publishing it took a history rewrite, a support ticket, and still left a fork behind.

Setup

1. Fork (or use as a template).
2. Repo secrets: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (required); RESEND_API_KEY, RECIPIENT_EMAILS, SENDER_FROM, RECIPIENT_NAME, DEEPGRAM_API_KEY, CALENDAR_ICS_URL, WEATHER_LOCATION_HOME, WEATHER_LOCATION_WORK (all optional — features degrade gracefully when unset).
3. Edit config.json: your sources, categories, and word budget.
4. Test with a manual run: Actions → Daily Brief → Run workflow with dry_run: true (full generation, no email/audio/commits; output lands as a run artifact).
5. Go live: uncomment the schedule: block in .github/workflows/daily-brief.yml.

Guard rails included

• pii-public-scan.yml — every push is scanned for email/phone/SSN-shaped strings (masked output). This repo is public; treat every committed byte as published.
• The generator fails closed on the personal-data mount: unset or missing means the Deep Dive section is omitted with a warning, never guessed.
• Dry-run artifacts contain your personal sections — don't print or publish them (the parent project removed its artifact-printing job for exactly this reason).

Layout

generate_brief.py     the pipeline (research → synthesis → render → audio → email)
brief_quality.py      prose-quality linter (see NOTICE for adapted parts)
config.json           sources, categories, word budget — the example set
templates/            HTML template for the brief + email
test_quality.py       linter tests
test_schedule.py      travel-aware scheduling tests
.github/workflows/    daily-brief.yml (the run), tests.yml, pii-public-scan.yml

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Third-party attributions in NOTICE.