Car Rental System

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Description

A full-stack Car Rental Web Application built with PHP, MySQL, Bootstrap, jQuery, and PHPMailer. Customers can browse cars, check prices, and make bookings; admins can manage vehicles, customers, and reservations.

This project was developed as a practical web application to demonstrate skills in backend development, authentication, database design, and UI integrations using a Bootstrap template.

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Engineering Highlights

• Implemented booking availability logic to prevent double bookings by updating vehicle status during active rentals
• Designed relational database schema for customers, cars, reservations, rentals, and payments
• Integrated Stripe payment gateway for secure transaction handling
• Built admin workflows for managing vehicle lifecycle (available, booked, maintenance)

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Features

Customer side

• View available cars with images, details, and daily price
• See individual car details page (car-single.php)
• Register and log in as a customer
• Secure login system with session handling
• Book or reserve cars from the listing or details page
• Contact form to send messages to the site owner
• Forget password flow:
  • Request reset
  • Email-based OTP verification (forgetpassword.php & regotpverify.php)
  • Update password (updatepassword.php)
• Make payment securely,

Admin side

• Note: Admin pages are inside the Admin/ folder
• Admin login dashboard
• Manage car inventory:
  • Add/edit/delete cars
  • Manage car details like plate, model, brand, price per day, etc.
  • Manage the car for maintenance.
• View and manage reservations/bookings
• View registered customers
• View and respond to contact form submissions
• Basic reporting/overview of system activity

Authentication & Security (Basic)

• PHP session-based authentication for both Admin & Customer
• Email-based verification using PHPMailer
• Separate login flows (login.php, register.php, logout.php)

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Technology used

Frontend

• HTML5
• CSS3
• Bootstrap4
• jQuery
• JavaScript

Backend

• PHP (Procedural)
• MySQL database

Libraries/tools

• PHPMailer for sending emails (OTP/password reset/contact)
• Bootstrap template based on Carbook (colorlib template)
• Stripe API (Payment gateway)

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Getting Started

Prerequisites

• XAMPP
• PHP 7+ (or compatible)
• MySQL/MariaDB/phpMyAdmin
• Composer (Optional, only if you want to reinstall PHPMailer via Composer)

Clone the Repository

• command: git clone https://github.com/ShivamManojPatel/Car-Rental-System.git && cd Car-Rental-System

• Move the project into your web server root:

  • For XAMPP (Windows): C:\xampp\htdocs\Car-Rental-System
  • For XAMPP (MacOS): /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/

Database Setup

1. Start Apache and MySQL from XAMPP.
2. Open phpMyAdmin at: - http://localhost/phpmyadmin
3. Create a new database, for example: - CREATE DATABASE car_rental;
4. Import the SQL file from the Database File folder: - Go to the new database in phpMyAdmin - Click on import - Select .sql file inside Database File/ - Click Go

This will create the necessary tables (Users, Cars, Booking, etc.)

Configure Database Connection
Open datacon.php and update: $server = "localhost";
$username = "root";
$password = ""; // Set MySQL password if you have one
$ dbname = "car_rental"; // Use the same name you created in phpMyAdmin

Save the file.

Configure Email (PHPMailer)
If you're using OTP or password reset features via email:

• Open the relevant files (e.g., regotpverify.php, forgotpassword.php, or PHPMailer config files)
• Configure:
  • SMTP host (e.g., smtp.gmail.com)
  • SMTP Port
  • Username (email)
  • App password (if using Gmail)
  • From Address/name

Make sure less-secure apps or app passwords are configured correctly with your email provider.

Run the Application
Open your browser and go to:

• http://localhost/Car-Rental-System/index.php

From there, you can:

• Browse cars
• Register as a customer
• Log in and test booking flows
• Log in as Admin (after creating admin credentials in the DB or via a seed)

Admin Credentials
Depending on how you set up the database:

• Check the imported SQL file for any default admin user.
• If there's no default admin:
  • Insert an admin row manually into the users table via phpMyAdmin.
  • Example: insert into customer(CUS_FNAME, CUS_LNAME, CUS_EMAIL, CUS_PASSWORD, CUS_PHONE, CUS_LICENSE_NUM, USER_TYPE)values('John', 'Doe', 'Admin_CarRental@gmail.com', 'Admin123', '555-555-5555', '123-xyz', 'Admin')
  • Here, CUS_EMAIL, CUS_PASSWORD, and USER_TYPE are important. This will help to log in as admin. And the Password should be hashed using the PHP password_hash() function

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Minor feature

• Role-based access control (Different login flow for customer and admin. But, same login page).
• Secure integration payment gateway using Stripe.
• Booking status based on stage of booking for better understanding (Pending, confirmed, cancelled, completed).
• Filters for sorting cars for a better surfing experience (by price range, brand, transmission type, etc).
• Logging in before renting or making a reservation for security and audit.

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Possible Enhancement

• Refactor into an MVC structure or use a framework like Laravel later.

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Acknowledgement

• Frontend UI based on the Carbook Bootstrap template from Colorlib.
• PHPMailer library for handling email features.
• Bootstrap, jQuery, Font Awesome, and related vendors inside vendor/ folder.

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Author

Shivam Patel, Krushi Patel & Smit Meghapara
Pace University | Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems