MatchBy

Web platform for creating, discovering, and joining local sports matches with teams, invites, real-time chat, notifications, and player ratings.

Click the image above to watch a walkthrough of the MatchBy application, including authentication, match creation, teams, chat, and user interactions.

About the Project

MatchBy is a full-stack web application designed to help people organize and participate in local sports matches. The platform allows users to discover nearby games, create public or private matches, manage teams, invite players, chat in real time, and build trust through player ratings.

The project was developed as part of a Master's degree software engineering project, with a focus on building a complete, production-oriented web application using modern .NET technologies.

The application supports two main user roles:

• Administrators: manage the platform and access seeded admin-level functionality.
• Members: create and join matches, manage teams, send invites, chat with other users, and rate players.

The main goal of the project was to reduce the friction of organizing sports activities by centralizing match discovery, team management, communication, and player coordination in one platform.

Features

• Register and authenticate users with ASP.NET Core Identity
• Create, edit, search, and join sports matches
• Support public and private matches
• Manage teams with owners, members, privacy settings, and maximum capacity
• Send and receive match invites
• Send and receive team invites
• Manage friends and user connections
• Use real-time chat for private, team, and match conversations
• Send chat messages with text, match invite links, and locations
• Receive real-time notifications through SignalR
• Rate players after matches
• Schedule background jobs for match state processing and match reminders
• Upload and validate user/team images through S3-compatible storage
• Support demo data seeding for local testing
• Run the full project locally with Docker

Tech Stack

Web / Frontend

• Blazor Server
• Razor Components
• Blazorise
• Tailwind CSS
• Flowbite Components

Backend

• ASP.NET Core
• .NET 10
• C#
• ASP.NET Core Identity
• Entity Framework Core
• FluentValidation

Real-Time Communication

• SignalR
• ChatHub
• NotificationHub

Background Jobs

• Hangfire
• PostgreSQL-backed job storage
• Scheduled match state processing
• Scheduled match reminder notifications

Database & Storage

• PostgreSQL 17.2
• Entity Framework Core with Npgsql
• S3-compatible file storage
• Supabase Storage compatible configuration

Testing & Tooling

• xUnit
• Moq
• Playwright
• Docker
• Docker Compose

Screenshots

Home

Match Creation

About

How to Run the Project

Create the Environment File

Copy the example environment file:

cp .env.example .env

The .env.example file already includes local development values for:

• PostgreSQL
• pgAdmin
• Resend placeholder API key
• OAuth placeholder credentials
• Blazorise placeholder token
• S3-compatible storage placeholder settings

Note: The placeholder values are enough for running the local demo with seeded users. Features that require real external providers, such as OAuth login or real S3 uploads, require valid credentials.

Start the Application

docker compose up --build

This starts:

• MatchBy web application
• PostgreSQL database
• pgAdmin

The application will be available at:

http://localhost:8080

pgAdmin will be available at:

http://localhost:5050

Demo Accounts

The project seeds demo users automatically in development mode.

Role	Email	Password
Admin	admin@admin.com	Admin!123
User	user1@user.com	User1!123
User	user2@user.com	User2!123
Test User	test1@test.com	Test!123
Test User	test2@test.com	Test!123

For local testing, use the email/password login form.

External login providers such as Google, GitHub, and Discord require real provider credentials and are not intended to be used with the default local placeholder values.

Stop the Project

docker compose down

Reset the Local Database

docker compose down -v
docker compose up --build

In development mode, the application recreates and seeds the database on startup, so the local environment is always prepared with demo data.

Running Tests

From the project/ directory, run:

dotnet test

Architecture

MatchBy follows a layered architecture with clear separation between UI, business logic, data access, and infrastructure concerns.

Presentation Layer

The presentation layer is built with Blazor Server and Razor Components. It includes pages for authentication, matches, teams, chat, users, profile management, and static content such as About and Contact pages.

Application / Service Layer

The service layer contains the main business logic for:

• Matches
• Match invites
• Teams
• Team invites
• Users
• Friends
• Conversations
• Chat messages
• Notifications
• Player ratings
• Background jobs
• File validation
• Image refresh
• Email sending
• S3-compatible storage

Data Access Layer

The data layer uses Entity Framework Core with PostgreSQL. It includes:

• ApplicationDbContext
• Entity configurations
• Database migrations
• Development seeders
• Repository classes for domain access

Real-Time Layer

SignalR is used for real-time communication through:

• ChatHub
• NotificationHub

This enables live chat and notification updates without requiring manual page refreshes.

Background Processing

Hangfire is used to run recurring background jobs, including:

• Processing match states
• Sending match reminders

The Hangfire dashboard is available at:

http://localhost:8080/hangfire

Main Domain Models

The project includes the following core domain entities:

• ApplicationUser
• Match
• Team
• Friend
• Invite
• MatchInvite
• TeamInvite
• Conversation
• ChatMessage
• Notification
• PlayerRating

These models support the main platform flows: creating matches, joining teams, inviting users, chatting, receiving notifications, and rating players.

Project Documentation

Additional documentation is available in the wiki.