Event Zaratof

Event Zaratof is a personal project I built end-to-end: a web platform where event organizers can publish their event galleries, and attendees can find every photo they appear in by simply uploading a selfie. Behind the scenes, a Python service powered by ageitgey/face_recognition matches the selfie against every face detected in the event’s photo set and returns the matching shots.

It’s a fullstack solo build — frontend, REST API, OAuth2 authorization, database, face-recognition microservice and deployment — and it lives in the Own invention section of this portfolio because the product, the design and the architecture are all mine.

Stack

What it does

• Event galleries — organizers create an event and upload the full photo set.
• Selfie-based search — an attendee uploads a single selfie; the face-recognition service computes a face embedding and returns every photo of the gallery where that face appears.
• OAuth2-secured API — the Symfony backend issues access tokens via the authorization_code grant (FOSOAuthServerBundle) so the React frontend (and any future mobile client) talks to the API as a registered OAuth client.
• Production-grade Symfony deploy — composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader, Doctrine migrations (doctrine:migrations:migrate), prod cache warm-up (cache:clear / cache:warmup --env=prod), .env.local for secrets (APP_ENV=prod, APP_SECRET, DATABASE_URL).

Frontend (Create React App)

Standard CRA workflow with yarn:

yarn start   # dev server on http://localhost:3000
yarn test    # interactive test runner
yarn build   # optimized production bundle in build/

Local dev environment: macOS Monterey 12.7.2, Node v18.19.0 managed via nvm.

Backend (Symfony 4)

Production deployment checklist used for the API:

# 1. Install dependencies (production-optimized)
composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader

# 2. .env.local (not committed)
#    APP_ENV=prod
#    APP_SECRET=...
#    DATABASE_URL="mysql://user:pass@127.0.0.1:3306/db"

# 3. Database
php bin/console doctrine:migrations:migrate --no-interaction

# 4. Cache
php bin/console cache:clear   --env=prod
php bin/console cache:warmup  --env=prod

Web server (Nginx or Apache) points the document root at public/ and rewrites all requests to index.php.

OAuth2 — authorization code

The API is secured by FOSOAuthServerBundle. An OAuth client is created via the Symfony console:

php bin/console fos:oauth-server:create-client \
    --redirect-uri="http://localhost:8000/redirect-uri-example" \
    --grant-type="authorization_code"

The bundle then returns a numeric id, a random_id and a secret. The effective client_id exposed to OAuth clients is {id}_{random_id}, paired with the generated secret.

Face-recognition service

Photo matching relies on ageitgey/face_recognition, a Python library built on top of dlib’s state-of-the-art face-recognition model. Each uploaded event photo is processed to extract face encodings; at search time, the attendee’s selfie is encoded and compared against the stored encodings, returning every match above a similarity threshold.

My role

Everything: product design, UX, React frontend, Symfony 4 API, MySQL schema and Doctrine migrations, OAuth2 authorization-code flow, Python face-recognition microservice, server provisioning and deployment at event-zaratof.com.