Booking / scheduling on Next.js 16 (App Router), Postgres (Neon) and Better Auth
Type-checked against the real SDKs, migration applied to a live Postgres (Neon), connection clients load-tested, then tracked for upstream drift and re-verified when it moves. How we verify
session validation runs in server components and route handlers, not at the edge
What you're getting
Next.js 16 App Router — file-based routing, server components, and the Edge proxy (Next 16's renamed middleware).
Postgres on Neon via Drizzle ORM and the postgres-js driver.
Better Auth — self-hosted auth running inside your app against your Postgres (Drizzle adapter).
Calendar-scoped booking — bookable resources with capacity, time-windowed availability slots, party-size reservations, and per-reservation payment settlement.
Setup
bun add next react react-dom drizzle-orm postgres better-authDATABASE_URLNeon pooled (-pooler) connection stringBETTER_AUTH_SECRETgenerate with `openssl rand -base64 32`BETTER_AUTH_URLyour app's base URLApply the schema with bunx drizzle-kit push
Initialization
Database client
Booking & scheduling schema: resources, availability & reservations
Resources & ownershipbookable things (rooms, seats, staff) owned by a Better Auth user, each carrying an integer capacity cap
Availability slots & calendar windowstime windows a resource publishes, indexed by (resourceId, startsAt) for calendar range queries
Reservations & party sizeholds and confirmations against a slot, consuming partySize units and walking held → confirmed → cancelled via CHECK
Booking payments & settlementone payment record per reservation, storing amountCents as integer and an opaque providerPaymentId for Stripe/etc.
Deploy targets
Decisions and compatibility
Auth runs in proxy.ts (Next 16's renamed middleware) on the Edge runtime: it gates on the session cookie's presence only — full session validation happens in Server Components and route handlers, not in the proxy.
prepare: false is mandatory — Neon's pooled endpoint is PgBouncer in transaction mode, where server-side prepared statements break across the pool.
Drizzle is paired here (not Prisma): Prisma's prepared-statement reliance is incompatible with transaction-mode pooling.
Self-hosted: Better Auth owns the user/session/account/verification tables. This stack emits them (db/auth-schema.ts) and hands them to the Drizzle adapter, so app-type schemas can foreign-key `user` directly.
Capacity is on the resource, not the slot: a reservation consumes partySize units of the slot's capacity, so multiple parties can share one slot up to its cap.
availabilitySlots carries an isOpen boolean so an owner can close a window without deleting it (and its child reservations); the cascade is intentionally one-way downward (slot → reservation → payment).