Forum / community 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).
Forum / community — slug-keyed category taxonomy, threaded discussions with open/locked status and pinning, and per-reply up/down votes.
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
Forum / community schema: categories, threads, replies & votes
Categories taxonomyslug-unique top-level categories each thread must belong to exactly one of
Threads (status & pinning)threads scoped to a category and author, with open/locked status and an is_pinned flag for surfacing
Thread repliesflat replies within a thread, each carrying a body and an author FK into Better Auth's user table
Reply votesappend-style up/down votes on replies, uniquely constrained per (reply, voter) pair
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.
Vote identity is enforced by a composite unique on (reply_id, voter_id): one vote per reply per voter, value constrained to (-1, 1) via CHECK rather than a separate enum.
Thread status uses text + CHECK ('open','locked') so new statuses ship without an ALTER TYPE migration; the same pattern applies to vote value.