KNIGHT HAVEN

Inspiration

KnightHaven is a community-driven platform created by UCF students to make staying connected easier. It was born at a UCF hackathon after realizing how frustrating it was to jump between Snapchat, Reddit, Yelp, UCF Events, and Facebook Marketplace just to find what was happening around campus. Events were scattered, marketplace posts vanished quickly, and reviews were all over the place.

KnightHaven brings it all together in one place. Verified UCF students can safely buy and sell items, discover campus events, and explore local spots with real reviews from fellow Knights. The Verified Knight system, tied to @ucf.edu emails, keeps everything authentic and student-focused, creating a trusted space for genuine community interaction.

By combining social connection, local discovery, and a secure marketplace, KnightHaven simplifies how UCF students connect, share, and support one another, making campus life and the surrounding community easier to navigate and more connected than ever.

What it does

KnightHaven is a peer-to-peer platform built exclusively for the UCF community that combines social connection, local discovery, and commerce in one place. Verified UCF students can safely buy and sell textbooks, electronics, and services like tutoring through a secure marketplace backed by @ucf.edu email verification. The platform features a real-time scraper that pulls live events from events.ucf.edu, a Nearby tab powered by Yelp’s API for local restaurants and services, and a verified badge system to build trust while allowing the broader community to browse listings safely.

How we built it

KnightHaven was built with a modern full-stack architecture focused on speed and scalability. The frontend uses React 19.1.1 with Vite for fast development and responsive custom CSS. The backend runs on Node.js and Express, managing authentication through Auth0, listings with image uploads via Multer, and database operations with Prisma ORM. A Python Flask microservice handles event scraping using BeautifulSoup4 with caching for efficiency. SQLite powers the database during development, featuring models for users, listings, services, posts, and places. Custom bash scripts manage service startup, port cleanup, and simultaneous process orchestration for a smooth development workflow.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating Auth0 with UCF-specific email verification required significant debugging to ensure only @ucf.edu users could access verified features. Our events scraper had to be rebuilt multiple times when UCF’s site structure changed, pushing us to design robust fallback logic. Managing multiple ports across services (frontend, backend, scraper, Prisma) led to conflicts, so we built automated startup scripts. Creating these scripts for mac and windows users on our team was also a significant challenge. Database migrations also required care as new fields like images and phone numbers were added.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud to have built a fully functional, multi-service app that integrates authentication, event scraping, marketplace features, and local discovery into one unified experience. Our Verified Knight system fosters real trust among students, while the scraper keeps campus events constantly updated. The Nearby tab lets users explore local restaurants, services, and hangout spots around UCF, complete with reviews and community feedback, creating a bridge between campus life and the surrounding area. Our image upload and deletion system showcases strong CRUD implementation, and our automation scripts make running the entire stack as simple as one command. We also took pride in the polished UI, with responsive design and subtle golden glow effects that reflect UCF’s identity.

What we learned

We learned how challenging it is to manage multiple services working together and how essential automation scripts are for stability. We gained experience with secure authentication, domain-based verification, and real-time data scraping with proper error handling. Database migrations and file management taught us the importance of schema planning and cleanup routines. Most importantly, we learned how critical documentation and orchestration are for keeping large projects maintainable as they grow.

What's next for KNIGHT HAVEN

For production, we plan to move KnightHaven from a development environment to a real, hosted platform. Our next steps include deploying the app using services like AWS Amplify for the frontend and containerizing the backend so it can run reliably in the cloud. We’re preparing to migrate from SQLite to a managed Postgres database to handle real user data at scale, and we’re focusing on secure account management, protected file storage, and proper access control so only verified students can use certain features. We’re also exploring best practices for storing credentials, protecting user information, and hardening authentication so KnightHaven can operate safely as an actual platform with real users