AlumX Backend 🚀

AlumX is a scalable, backend-heavy alumni networking platform designed to connect students, alumni, and faculty through mentorship, knowledge sharing, and AI-powered discovery.
This repository contains the Spring Boot backend powering AlumX.

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📚 Table of Contents

• Overview
• Core Features
• AI-Powered Capabilities
• System Architecture
• Tech Stack
• Database Schema (High Level)
• API Design
• Security
• Project Setup
• Directory Structure
• Contribution Guidelines
• Future Enhancements

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✨ Core Features

👤 User Management

• Student, Alumni, and Professor roles
• JWT based login using email & password
• OAuth2 login (Google, LinkedIn)
• Profile completion with skills, interests, experience

🧑‍🏫 Mentorship System

• Students can request alumni as mentors
• Chat functionality is available between mentor and mentee.
• Alumni can accept or reject mentorship
• Professors can act as moderators/proctors

📝 Alumni Blogs

• Alumni can write experience-based blog posts
• Students can like, comment, and engage
• Feed ranking based on engagement like LinkedIn/Reddit

🔍 Smart Alumni Search

• Search alumni by:
  • Company
  • Skills
  • Domain
  • Graduation year
• AI-powered semantic search (RAG-based)

📄 Resume Builder

• AI-assisted resume generation
• Uses user-provided API key
• Auto-fill details, skills from AlumX profile

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🏗 System Architecture

Client (Jetpack Compose)
        |
        v
Spring Boot API Gateway
        |
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| Auth | User | Blog | Mentor | Search | AI |
------------------------------------------------
        |
 PostgreSQL | Redis | Vector DB | Object Storage

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⚡ Tech Stack

Backend

• Spring Boot 4
• Spring Security + OAuth2
• Spring Data JPA
• Hibernate

Databases

• MySQL – Primary database
• Redis – Caching & session management
• Vector DB (Pinecone / Weaviate / FAISS) – AI search

AI & Search

• OpenAI / Gemini / HuggingFace APIs
• LangChain / Spring AI

Infrastructure

• Docker
• GitHub Actions (CI/CD)
• AWS / GCP (optional)

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Prerequisites

• Java 21
• Maven
• PostgreSQL
• Docker
• VectorDB
• WebSockets

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Database Schema (High Level)

Complete Database Diagram

View the complete, interactive database schema diagram here:

AlumX Database Diagram - Interactive View

The diagram includes:

• 9 main entities: User, Chat, Message, GroupChat, Participant, GroupMessage, JobPost, JobPostComment, JobPostLike, Resume
• 12 user profile collection tables: skills, education, tech_stack, languages, frameworks, communication_skills, certifications, projects, soft_skills, hobbies, experience, internships
• All relationships properly mapped with foreign keys and cardinality (1:1, 1:N, N:M)
• Indexes and constraints as defined in the codebase

Database Tables Overview

The AlumX backend uses the following main entity groups:

1. User Management - Core user profiles with role-based access (Student, Alumni, Professor)
2. Chat System - One-on-one messaging between users
3. Group Chat - Multi-user group conversations with participants
4. Job Posts - Alumni experience sharing with engagement features (likes, comments)
5. Resume System - AI-assisted resume management for users

All tables follow proper normalization principles and include appropriate indexes for optimal query performance.

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🛠️ Project Setup

This project uses Spring Boot + PostgreSQL and reads configuration from environment variables to keep secrets out of the codebase.

1️⃣ Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/opencodeiiita/alum-x-backend.git
cd alum-x-backend

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2️⃣ Set up PostgreSQL locally

Make sure PostgreSQL is installed and running on your system.

Create database and user

Login to PostgreSQL as postgres:

psql -U postgres

Then run:

CREATE DATABASE alumx;
CREATE USER alumx WITH PASSWORD 'alumx123';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE alumx TO alumx;

Exit PostgreSQL:

\q

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3️⃣ Configure environment variables

The .env file you will need, will be provided to you by the mentor

⚠️ Do not commit .env — it is ignored via .gitignore.

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4️⃣ IntelliJ Configuration

Spring Boot does not automatically load .env files in IntelliJ.

Steps:

1. Go to Run → Edit Configurations
2. Select your Spring Boot run configuration
3. Under Environment variables, click Load from file
4. Select the .env file
5. Apply and close

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5️⃣ Build and run the backend

mvn clean install
mvn spring-boot:run

🤝 Contribution Guidelines

• Follow clean architecture
• Use meaningful commit messages
• Open PRs with proper descriptions
• Avoid pushing secrets

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