Footynet

Footynet connects football players and clubs in Croatia's lower leagues (4th tier and below). Clubs post ads for the positions they need to fill. Players apply with their profile and a cover letter. Once a club accepts an application, the two sides can talk in a real-time chat.

I built it as my graduation thesis and kept developing it into a deployed full-stack app: an ASP.NET Core Web API, a Next.js frontend, PostgreSQL, Docker and a GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline.

https://footynet-ten.vercel.app/

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Features

Players

• Profile with photo, multiple positions, preferred foot, availability status and career history
• Browse open job ads and filter by position, league or keyword
• Apply with a cover letter, track application status, withdraw an application

Clubs

• Club profile with crest, league and county
• Create, edit, close and reopen job ads
• Review applicants' profiles, then accept or reject them
• Message players whose applications were accepted

Admins

• Dashboard with platform statistics
• Approve or reject club registrations (clubs can't post ads until they are approved)
• Deactivate and reactivate users, remove job ads

Across the whole platform

• Real-time chat with read receipts and an unread counter
• Email confirmation, password reset, and email alerts about new messages while the user is offline
• Fully bilingual, Croatian and English, in both the UI and the API's error messages
• City autocomplete through the Mapbox Search API
• Legal pages (terms of use, privacy policy) and account deletion

Tech stack

Layer	Technologies
Backend	ASP.NET Core 8 Web API, C#, Entity Framework Core 8, Dapper, FluentValidation, SignalR, Serilog, MailKit
Frontend	Next.js 15 (App Router), React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, next-intl, Axios, SignalR client
Database	PostgreSQL (EF Core code-first migrations)
Auth	JWT bearer tokens, role-based authorization (Player / Club / Admin), BCrypt password hashing
Testing	xUnit, Moq
DevOps	Docker (multi-stage build), GitHub Actions, Render (API), Vercel (frontend)

Architecture

┌──────────────────────┐   REST (JSON)    ┌──────────────────────────┐        ┌────────────┐
│  footynet-frontend   │ ───────────────▶ │  Footynet.WebApi         │ ─────▶ │ PostgreSQL │
│  Next.js / React     │ ◀─────────────── │  ASP.NET Core 8          │        └────────────┘
│                      │   SignalR (WS)   │                          │ ─────▶ SMTP (Brevo)
└──────────────────────┘                  └──────────────────────────┘ ─────▶ Mapbox API

The backend is a layered solution: Controller → Service → Repository → Data.

Project	Responsibility
Footynet.WebApi	Controllers, SignalR hub, validators, middleware, rate limiting, email sending
Footynet.Service	Business logic, JWT issuing
Footynet.Repository	Data access with EF Core and hand-written SQL through Dapper
Footynet.Data	DbContext, migrations, seed data
Footynet.Model	Entities, DTOs, localized messages (.resx)
Footynet.Tests	Unit tests

Implementation highlights

• Real-time messaging. The SignalR hub only pushes events. Sending a message goes through a normal REST endpoint, so validation and persistence work like the rest of the API. Browsers can't set headers on WebSockets, so the JWT is accepted from the query string, but only on the hub path. A presence tracker records who is online. A user who is offline gets an email about a new message, at most once every 30 minutes.
• Background email queue. Emails go through a queue processed by a hosted service, so requests don't wait on SMTP. In development, when no SMTP host is configured, emails are written to the log instead.
• Security hardening.
  • Per-IP rate limits: 10 requests/min on auth endpoints, 5 per 15 min on endpoints that send email.
  • X-Forwarded-For handling that a client can't spoof.
  • Security headers and a CSP on both the API and the frontend.
  • Uploaded photos are checked by their actual bytes, not by file name or declared type.
• Localization end to end. The frontend sends Accept-Language. The API returns errors in a consistent { status, message, code } shape with translated messages. A CI step fails the build if the Croatian and English translation files get out of sync.
• Data model. Players, clubs and admins share one users table (TPH inheritance). Lookup data, all 21 Croatian counties and 80+ leagues from the 4th tier down, is seeded through migrations with fixed IDs. Migrations run automatically on startup.
• Container fix. The API's .NET container crashed on the hosting platform with exit code 139. The cause was W^X memory protection in the sandboxed runtime, and the fix is documented in the Dockerfile.

Getting started

Prerequisites

• .NET 8 SDK
• Node.js 20+
• PostgreSQL, either installed locally or in Docker:

docker run --name footynet-db -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres -p 5432:5432 -d postgres:16

Backend

cd Footynet/Footynet
cp appsettings.Example.json appsettings.json

Fill in appsettings.json (see Configuration), then run:

dotnet run --launch-profile http

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