Video platform 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).
Video platform — user-owned channels with published videos, append-only view records, and ordered playlists.
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
Video platform schema: channels, videos, views & playlists
Channelsuser-owned channel rows, each with a globally unique handle that anchors the channel's public URL
Videos & processing statevideos belonging to a channel, with a CHECK-constrained status lifecycle (processing → published | private) and nullable publishedAt
Viewsappend-only view events recording which video was watched, the optional viewer identity, and seconds watched
Playlistsordered collections of videos within a channel, with playlist_videos carrying a composite PK and explicit position column
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.
channels.handle carries a unique constraint — URL-safe handle collisions are caught at the DB layer, not in application code.
video_views is append-only (no update path, composite index on videoId + createdAt): aggregate view counts and watch-time stats by rolling up rows rather than maintaining a running total.