Memory Museum

In the future, A.I. will run everything, and the things we enjoy will be a distant memory. With this Memory Museum application we can turn our collections of everything we enjoy about this century, and perfectly preserve it online with a description of what it meant to us, to give the future a peek into the window of our lives back then. This museum will house exhibits that will demonstrate what objects of our time mean to us. Registered users can...

• View the various exhibits
• View the various items within the exhibit
• Create their own exhibit
• Submit items to other users' exhibits
• Approve/Reject items submitted to their exhibit
• Delete their own exhibits
• Upload their own items
• Edit their own items
• Delete their own Items
• Rate other users Exhibits
• View the average rating of your exhibit

As an Admin you can do all this plus...

• Deactivate active users and reactivate deactivated users
• View list of deactivated users
• View and manage reports made by other users
• Manage your team of moderators with other Administrators

Prerequisites

Make sure the following are installed on your machine before continuing:

Tool	Download
VSCode	code.visualstudio.com
pgAdmin 4	pgadmin.org/download
Git	git-scm.com/downloads
PostgreSQL	postgresql.org/download
.NET 8 SDK	dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/8.0
Node.js (includes npm)	nodejs.org/en/download

How to Install

1. Open your terminal and clone the repository: git clone git@github.com:jaymenelson56/MemoryMuseum.git
2. Navigate into the project directory and run dotnet user-secrets init
3. Install the Entity Framework CLI tools: dotnet tool install --global dotnet-ef
4. Run dotnet user-secrets set MusuemMemoryDbConnectionString "Host=localhost;Port=5432;Username=postgres;Password=<your password>;Database=MuseumMemory" — replace <your password> with your PostgreSQL password
5. Run dotnet user-secrets set AdminPassword password to set the first two accounts' password to "password" (change it to whatever you prefer)
6. Run dotnet ef migrations add InitialCreate
7. Run dotnet ef database update
8. Run code . inside the MemoryMuseum directory to open it in VSCode
9. Navigate to the Run and Debug menu in VSCode and make sure .NET Core is selected as your debugger
10. Run the debugger
11. In a new terminal, cd into the client folder and run npm run dev
12. Once in, follow the prompts, register, and enjoy the site

Running in Dev Mode

Start both the backend and frontend each time you want to run the app locally.

Backend

Option A — VSCode debugger: Open the Run and Debug panel (Ctrl+Shift+D), select .NET Core, and press F5.

Option B — terminal: From the project root, run:

dotnet run --launch-profile https

Either way, the API will be available at:

• https://localhost:5001 (HTTPS — used by the frontend proxy)
• http://localhost:5000 (HTTP)

Tip: use dotnet watch --launch-profile https instead of dotnet run to get hot-reload on backend file changes.

Frontend

In a terminal, cd into the client folder and run:

npm run dev

Vite will start the dev server and automatically open the app in your browser at http://localhost:5173. All /api requests are proxied to the backend at https://localhost:5001.

Running a Production Preview

This project does not include an npm start script. To preview a production build locally:

1. In the client folder, build the app:

npm run build

2. Then serve the build:

npm run preview

The preview server runs at http://localhost:4173 by default. Make sure the backend is still running (see above) so API calls succeed.