Notes / knowledge base 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).
Notes / knowledge-base — user-owned notebooks, versioned notes, free-form tags, and per-note read/write sharing.
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
Notes app schema: notebooks, notes, tags & sharing
Notebooks & notesthe owner-scoped notebook containers and the notes nested inside them, with archive support
Tagsfree-form text labels attached to individual notes, deduplicated by a composite unique constraint
Sharing & permissionsper-note grants to other users with a CHECK-enforced read/write permission level
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.
note_tags enforces a unique constraint on (note_id, tag), so duplicate tags per note are rejected at the DB level rather than in application code.
note_shares carries a CHECK constraint limiting permission to 'read' or 'write', and a composite unique on (note_id, shared_with) — one share row per user per note, updated in place rather than appended.