Tickowt - Event Management & Ticketing Platform (Snapshot as of October 2025)

Tickowt, a full-featured web application designed to streamline event management and ticket sales. It provides a robust platform for university societies and other organisations to create, manage, and analyse their events, while offering a seamless and secure ticket purchasing experience for attendees.

tickowt.mp4

Key Features

• Full Event Lifecycle Management: Organisers can create, update, and manage events through a dedicated dashboard.
• Secure Online Ticket Sales: Integration with Stripe for secure and reliable payment processing for paid events, plus support for free events.
• Organiser Dashboard: A central hub for organisers to view event analytics, track ticket sales, and monitor attendee check-ins.
• Robust Authentication: Supports both traditional email/password registration and social authentication (Google) using django-allauth.
• Asynchronous Task Handling: Uses Celery and Redis to manage background tasks like sending ticket confirmation emails, handling expired events, ticket checkout sessions and more, ensuring a non-blocking user experience.
• Modern Frontend Interactivity: HTMX for efficient partial page updates from the server and Alpine.js for lightweight client-side interactivity. I chose this stack to ensure a smooth user experience without the overhead of a full SPA framework like i.e. React.
• Responsive Design: Tailwind CSS for the CSS framework and DaisyUI for the component library, the UI is fully responsive and works seamlessly across desktops and mobile devices.
• QR Code Ticketing & Scanning: Each ticket generates a unique QR code. Organisers can use a built-in scanner on the platform to validate tickets and check in attendees in real-time.

Architecture & Technology Stack

Tickowt is built with a modern, scalable architecture that leverages the power of Django for the backend while incorporating modern frontend techniques for a dynamic user experience.

Backend

• Framework: Django 5
• Asynchronous Tasks: Celery with Redis as the message broker. Used for sending confirmation emails and other background processes.
• Authentication: django-allauth for handling local and social (Google) authentication flows.
• Deployment: The application is configured for production deployment using Gunicorn and hosted on a VPS using docker.
• Error Monitoring: Integrated with Sentry for real-time error tracking and performance monitoring.

Frontend

• Templating: Standard Django templates, supercharged with modern libraries.
• Interactivity:
  • HTMX: For handling AJAX requests and smooth partial-page updates directly from the backend, minimising the need for complex client-side JavaScript.
  • Alpine.js: For lightweight, declarative client-side logic and UI interactions.
• Styling: Tailwind CSS and DaisyUI for a utility-first, responsive design.
• Asset Bundling: Webpack for compiling and bundling frontend assets.

Database

• Database: PostgreSQL (via psycopg2), a robust and scalable open-source relational database.
• S3 Storage: Using DigitalOcean Spaces (S3-compatible) for storing event images.

Payments

• Payment Gateway: Stripe is used for all payment processing, including handling credit card payments and processing webhooks for events like successful payments.

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Diagrams

Currently WIP!

1. System Architecture Diagram

WIP!

2. Request Flow for Ticket Purchase (Sequence Diagram)

WIP!

How it currently works

• The sequence of interactions when a user clicks "Buy Ticket".
• Browser: Makes a request to the Django backend.
• Django View: Creates a Stripe Checkout Session.
• Stripe API: Django redirects the user to Stripe.
• Browser: User completes payment on Stripe's page.
• Stripe Webhook: Stripe sends a checkout.session.completed event to your webhook endpoint.
• Django Webhook View: Handles the webhook, validates the event, and creates the Order and Attendee records.
• Celery: The view dispatches a task to Celery to send a confirmation email.
• Celery Worker: Picks up the task and sends the email with the QR code ticket.