🏨 LuxeLodging

Full-Stack Rental Marketplace

A production-style Airbnb-inspired rental marketplace with real payments, live search, and a hybrid multi-database architecture.

🔗 Live Demo · 🔧 Backend API

First load may take up to a minute (free-tier hosting spins down when idle) — Subsequent requests are significantly faster once the service has started.
Demo credentials are available below.

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📸 Screenshots

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✨ Key Features

For Guests

• Search & filter properties by city, price range, dates, and guest count, with Redis-cached results
• Property detail pages with an image gallery (zoom/pan lightbox), interactive location map, and live availability calendar
• Secure booking flow with real Razorpay payment integration (test mode)
• Booking management — view history, cancel unpaid bookings
• Leave verified reviews (only for completed stays)

For Hosts

• Full property CRUD with image upload (Cloudinary) and cover-image management
• Interactive map-based location picker (click-to-pin or manual lat/long entry)
• Dashboard for managing listings and viewing bookings received

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🔒 Technical Highlights

• Race-condition-safe bookings — double-booking prevention via MySQL transactions with row-level locking on the property row (SELECT ... FOR UPDATE), closing a gap where sparse availability data alone couldn't guarantee a lock.
• Tamper-resistant payments — Razorpay signatures are verified server-side and cross-checked against the specific booking's stored order ID, preventing a valid signature from one payment being replayed against a different booking.
• Targeted cache invalidation — search caches invalidate on every property create/update/delete, not just updates.
• Stateless auth with real logout — JWTs are stateless by design; a Redis-backed blacklist gives genuine token invalidation on logout.
• Latency-aware infrastructure — identified a cross-continental latency bottleneck post-deployment (US backend ↔ India database) and resolved it by re-aligning regions (Singapore ↔ Bangalore), cutting booking-creation latency roughly 3-5x.
• Cloud-safe image handling — in-memory buffer streaming to Cloudinary instead of disk staging, after discovering ephemeral filesystems on PaaS hosts broke a disk-based approach that worked fine locally.

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🛠️ Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Frontend	React (Vite), Redux Toolkit, Tailwind CSS v4, React Router, Leaflet
Backend	Node.js, Express — modular monolith
Primary DB	MySQL (Aiven) — relational data
Secondary DB	MongoDB Atlas — reviews
Cache	Redis (Upstash) — search cache, rate limiting, JWT blacklist
Payments	Razorpay — order creation + signature verification
Images	Cloudinary
Auth	JWT + bcrypt
Deployment	Vercel · Render · Aiven
Containerization	Docker + Docker Compose

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🏗️ Architecture

                    ┌─────────────────┐
                    │  React (Vercel) │
                    └────────┬────────┘
                             │ HTTPS
                    ┌────────▼────────┐
                    │ Express API     │
                    │ (Render)        │
                    └────────┬────────┘
          ┌──────────────────┼──────────────────┐
   ┌──────▼──────┐   ┌───────▼───────┐   ┌──────▼───────┐
   │ Auth Module │   │Property Module│   │Booking Module│
   └──────┬──────┘   └───────┬───────┘   └──────┬───────┘
          │                  │                   │
   ┌──────▼──────────────────▼───────────────────▼──────┐
   │              MySQL (Aiven) — relational            │
   └────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
          │
   ┌──────▼──────┐   ┌────────────────┐   ┌─────────────┐
   │  MongoDB    │   │ Redis(Upstash) │   │ Cloudinary  │
   │  (reviews)  │   │(cache/sessions)│   │  (images)   │
   └─────────────┘   └────────────────┘   └─────────────┘

Modular monolith, not microservices — each domain (Auth, Property, Booking, Reviews) is self-contained with its own routes/controller/service, deployed as one service. Avoids distributed-systems overhead at a scale that doesn't need it, while staying structured to split out later if it ever does.

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📂 View Project Structure (Frontend + Backend)

luxelodging/
├── backend/src/
│   ├── config/       # DB & service connections
│   ├── modules/      # auth, property, booking, reviews
│   ├── middleware/
│   ├── models/       # MySQL + MongoDB models
│   └── utils/
├── frontend/src/
│   ├── pages/
│   ├── components/
│   ├── features/     # Redux slices
│   └── api/
└── docker-compose.yml

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🔌 API Endpoints

Method	Endpoint	Description
POST	/api/auth/register	Create account
POST	/api/auth/login	Authenticate, receive JWT
POST	/api/auth/logout	Blacklist current token
GET	/api/properties/search	Search with filters, Redis-cached
GET	/api/properties/:id	Property detail + images
POST	/api/properties	Create listing (host)
POST	/api/properties/:id/images	Upload images (host)
GET	/api/bookings/availability/:propertyId	Check date availability
POST	/api/bookings	Create booking + Razorpay order (guest)
POST	/api/bookings/verify-payment	Verify payment signature
PATCH	/api/bookings/:id/cancel	Cancel unpaid booking (guest)
GET	/api/reviews/:propertyId	Get reviews + average rating
POST	/api/reviews	Add review (guest, verified booking only)

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📊 Project Stats

• 20+ REST API endpoints
• Authentication & authorization
• Hybrid SQL/NoSQL persistence
• Redis-backed caching
• Real payment integration
• Dockerized deployment

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🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

Node.js ≥ 22, MySQL 8+ (or free Aiven instance), free accounts on MongoDB Atlas, Upstash, Cloudinary, Razorpay (test mode)

# Backend
cd backend
npm install
cp .env.example .env      # fill in your credentials
mysql -u root -p your_db < src/models/mysql/schema.sql
npm run dev

# Frontend (new terminal)
cd frontend
npm install
cp .env.example .env      # set VITE_API_URL
npm run dev

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☁️ Deployment

Service	Host	Notes
Frontend	Vercel	Free tier, auto-deploys on push
Backend	Render (Singapore)	Free tier — sleeps after 15 min idle
MySQL	Aiven (Bangalore)	Free tier, TLS-required connection
MongoDB / Redis / Cloudinary / Razorpay	Managed cloud, free tiers	Unchanged across environments

Backend and database regions were deliberately co-located (Singapore ↔ Bangalore) after identifying a cross-continental latency bottleneck during initial deployment — see Technical Highlights below.

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🧪 Demo Credentials

Role	Email	Password
Guest	Test@Deployed.com	Test@Deployed
Host	test1@example.com	test234

These accounts are reset periodically for demonstration purposes.

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🔮 Future Improvements

• Offload email notifications using BullMQ and Redis.
• AI concierge chatbot for natural-language property search.
• AI-generated property descriptions for hosts.

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👤 Author

AMULYA GUPTA
· GitHub
· LinkedIn

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📄 License

This project was built for educational and portfolio purposes.