Lost And Found

A college project for a website where people can report lost or found items so they can be reclaimed. Built with ASP.NET Core MVC and Entity Framework Core.

Screenshots

The site is based on posts. Any visitor can browse items, but you need an account to see post details and contact the poster via email.

Each user has a customizable profile.

To create a post you need a title, description, and at least one item.

Users can report posts, other users, and bugs. Admins review these reports and can manage categories, roles, and bans.

Tech Stack

• Framework: ASP.NET Core 9.0 (MVC)
• ORM: Entity Framework Core 9.0 with SQLite
• Auth: ASP.NET Core Identity with cookie-based authentication
• Image uploads: Cloudinary
• Frontend: Razor views, Bootstrap 5, Font Awesome, jQuery

Prerequisites

• .NET 9.0 SDK
• A Cloudinary account (free tier works fine)

Getting Started

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/Theodor908/LostAndFound.git
cd LostAndFound

2. Set up your environment variables

The app reads its secrets from appsettings.json. You need to replace the API_SECRET placeholders with your actual values:

• TokenKey — any long random string (used for JWT signing)
• CloudName, ApiKey, ApiSecret — from your Cloudinary dashboard

You can either edit appsettings.json directly for local development, or use .NET User Secrets to keep them out of the repo:

dotnet user-secrets init
dotnet user-secrets set "TokenKey" "your-random-token-key-here"
dotnet user-secrets set "CloudinarySettings:CloudName" "your-cloud-name"
dotnet user-secrets set "CloudinarySettings:ApiKey" "your-api-key"
dotnet user-secrets set "CloudinarySettings:ApiSecret" "your-api-secret"

3. Restore dependencies

dotnet restore

4. Run the app

dotnet run

The app will automatically:

• Create the SQLite database and run migrations
• Seed sample users, posts, categories, and photos

Once it's running, open https://localhost:7110 in your browser.

Default accounts

Role	Username	Password
Admin	admin	Pa$$w0rd
Member	(seeded users from Users.json)	Pa$$w0rd

Project Structure

Controllers/    → MVC controllers
Services/       → Business logic
Data/           → Repositories and EF Core context
Entities/       → Domain models
Models/         → DTOs
Views/          → Razor templates
Interfaces/     → Service and repository contracts
Helpers/        → Seed data, validators, AutoMapper profiles
Extensions/     → DI registration and Identity config
wwwroot/        → Static assets (CSS, JS, images)