🍳 Recipe World

Recipe World is a full-stack web application designed to demonstrate enterprise-level software development practices using ASP.NET Core MVC (.NET 8).

This project was built to showcase proficiency in N-Tier Architecture, Secure Authentication, Database Management, and Unit Testing. It features a complete recipe management ecosystem with role-based security, ingredient tracking, and an admin approval workflow.

Live demo: https://recipeworld-p1x5.onrender.com/

The hosted Render demo uses SQLite on the free tier, so seeded sample data can reset on redeploy. Public demo credentials are limited to the demo user; admin credentials and signing keys are supplied through private environment variables.

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📸 Screenshots

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🚀 Why This Project Matters (Technical Highlights)

• Clean Architecture: Implements a Service Layer pattern to decouple Controllers from Business Logic and Data Access, ensuring maintainability and testability.
• Identity & Security: Rigorous implementation of ASP.NET Core Identity with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to differentiate between Administrators and Standard Users.
• Database Engineering: Utilizes Entity Framework Core with a Code-First approach, including complex relationships (Many-to-Many for Recipes-Ingredients), lazy loading proxies, and robust seeding strategies.
• Quality Assurance: Includes a test project (worldRecipeMvc.Tests) utilizing xUnit and Moq to verify business logic isolation using an In-Memory database.
• Hybrid Interface: Features both a traditional MVC frontend and a Swagger-documented API layer, demonstrating versatility in handling different client types.

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🛠️ Tech Stack

Category	Technologies
Framework	.NET 8, ASP.NET Core MVC
Data Access	Entity Framework Core (SQL Server), LINQ
Authentication	ASP.NET Core Identity (Cookies & JWT Support)
Frontend	Razor Views, Bootstrap 5, jQuery Validation, CSS3
Testing	xUnit, Moq, EF Core In-Memory DB
Tools	Swagger/OpenAPI, Dependency Injection (DI), Git

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🏗️ Architecture

The solution follows a separation of concerns principle to ensure scalability:

graph TB
  subgraph Presentation["🎨 Presentation Layer"]
    VIEWS["Razor Views<br/>(UI/UX)"]
    MVC["MVC Controllers<br/>(Orchestration)"]
    API["API Controllers<br/>(REST Endpoints)"]
    MW["Middleware<br/>Global Error Handling"]
  end

  subgraph Application["⚙️ Business Logic Layer"]
    SVC["Services<br/>(RecipeService, IngredientService)"]
    DTO["DTOs & ViewModels<br/>(Data Transfer)"]
  end

  subgraph Infrastructure["🔧 Infrastructure Layer"]
    DBCTX["EF Core DbContext<br/>(Data Access)"]
    ID["Identity Provider<br/>(Auth & Roles)"]
    SQL["SQL Server"]
  end

  VIEWS --> MVC
  MVC --> SVC
  API --> SVC
  MW --> MVC
  SVC --> DTO
  SVC --> DBCTX
  DBCTX --> SQL
  ID --> DBCTX

  style Application fill:#2196F3,color:#fff
  style Infrastructure fill:#FF9800,color:#fff
  style Presentation fill:#4CAF50,color:#fff

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✨ Key Features

👤 User Experience

• Recipe management: Users can create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) their own recipes.
• Favorites: Bookmark recipes with one click and revisit them on a personal My Favorites page.
• Ratings & reviews: 1–5 star reviews with comments; averages shown on cards and detail pages.
• Trending home page: Top-rated and most-favorited recipes, served from an in-memory cache.
• Smart search & pagination: Search and windowed pagination across recipes, categories, and ingredients.
• Image handling: Uploads validated by extension, size, and file signature (magic bytes).

🛡️ Admin & Security

• Approval workflows: New ingredients and categories enter a Pending state and require admin approval.
• Role management: Distinct capabilities for Admin vs User roles, enforced in the service layer.
• Rate limiting: Per-IP global limits plus a strict policy on the login endpoint (HTTP 429).
• Configurable seeding: Demo/admin account passwords come from configuration; production secrets are supplied by environment variables, not source files.

🧪 API & Testing

• REST API with JWT: POST /api/auth/login issues Bearer tokens; endpoints documented in Swagger UI.
• Result pattern: Services return FluentResults Result<T> mapped to proper HTTP codes (400/403/404/409).
• Testing: 90 tests — xUnit service tests (EF Core In-Memory) plus full integration tests (WebApplicationFactory + SQLite in-memory) covering auth, rate limiting, and the API surface.
• Observability: Serilog structured logging and a /health endpoint.

🗂️ Project Structure

High-level overview of where to find things:

• src/worldRecipeMvc/ — main ASP.NET Core MVC application
  • Controllers/ — MVC controllers and Controllers/Api/ REST endpoints
  • DTOs/ — DTOs used by the API layer
  • Services/ — business logic (service layer)
  • Data/ — EF Core DbContext, migrations, seeding
  • Models/ — domain entities and Models/ViewModels/ used by views
  • Middleware/ — custom middleware (global error handling)
  • Views/ — Razor views
  • wwwroot/ — static assets (CSS/JS/images)
• src/worldRecipeMvc.Tests/ — xUnit test project (service-level tests)
• img/worldRecipeMvc/wwwroot/images/recipes/ — image storage folder used for uploads
• sql/ — optional SQL scripts/utilities

💻 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• .NET 8 SDK
• SQL Server Express or LocalDB

Installation

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/MatheusFerraro/RecipeWorld.git
cd RecipeWorld

2. Configure database

Update the connection string in src/worldRecipeMvc/appsettings.json if you are not using a local SQL Server:

{
  "ConnectionStrings": {
    "RecipeWorldConnectionString": "Server=(local);Database=WorldRecipeDb;Trusted_Connection=True;MultipleActiveResultSets=true;Encrypt=false"
  }
}

3. Run the application (migrations and sample data are applied automatically at startup)

dotnet run --project src/worldRecipeMvc

Access the app

• Web UI: https://localhost:7008 (port may vary)
• Swagger API: https://localhost:7008/swagger
• Health check: https://localhost:7008/health

Demo account: demo@recipeworld.com / Demo123!

For local development, you can also seed an admin account by setting SeedData:AdminPassword in user secrets, an ignored appsettings.Development.json, or environment variables. Do not commit real admin passwords, JWT keys, database passwords, or .env files.

🐳 Run with Docker

The compose stack includes the app and a SQL Server 2022 container, with named volumes for database data and uploaded images:

cp .env.example .env    # set MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD and JWT_KEY
docker compose up --build

Then open http://localhost:8080 — see README.Docker.md for details.

🔑 Using the API

# 1. Get a token
curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/auth/login \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"email":"demo@recipeworld.com","password":"Demo123!"}'

# 2. Call authenticated endpoints with the Bearer token
curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/RecipesApi \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"recipeName":"My Recipe","instructions":"1. Cook."}'

🧪 Running Tests

dotnet test worldRecipeMvc.sln

90 tests: service-level unit tests (xUnit + EF Core In-Memory) and end-to-end integration tests (WebApplicationFactory over SQLite in-memory) covering the API, JWT auth, rate limiting, and MVC smoke paths.

📄 License

MIT — see LICENSE.

📬 Contact

I am currently looking for internship or junior developer opportunities.

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcamiloferraro/
• Email: mailto:matheus.ferraro@gmail.com