Social network on React Router v8, Postgres (Neon) and Supabase Auth

React Router v8 (framework mode): SSR, config/file routes under app/, loaders/actions, and resource routes for API endpoints.

Postgres on Neon via Drizzle ORM and the postgres-js driver.

Supabase Auth: hosted identity (GoTrue) via the @supabase/ssr cookie client; email+password + OAuth.

Social network: public profiles with @-handles, a directed follow graph, an authored-post feed, and per-post like edges.

Database client

import { drizzle } from "drizzle-orm/postgres-js";
import postgres from "postgres";

// Neon pooled endpoint = PgBouncer transaction mode → prepared statements off.
// ponytail: single module-level client; the serverless runtime + PgBouncer do
// the pooling, so no custom pool/globalThis singleton dance needed.
const client = postgres(process.env.DATABASE_URL!, { prepare: false });

export const db = drizzle({ client });

one public profile per Better Auth user, with a unique @-handle and optional bio/avatar

directed follower→following edges with a composite unique that prevents duplicate follows

authored feed posts keyed to a Better Auth user, indexed per-author for profile timeline queries

post↔user like edges with a composite unique enforcing one like per user per post

Framework mode (not data/library mode): routes live under app/, declared in app/routes.ts. API endpoints are resource routes (a route module exporting loader/action but no default component).

Data flows through loaders (run on the server before render) and actions (mutations); components read it with useLoaderData / useActionData. There are no React Server Components — every server-rendered route is a loader plus a client component.

Auth gates in the loader, not in middleware: a protected route's loader calls requireAuth(request), which throws a redirect Response that React Router short-circuits on — so a logged-out user never reaches the protected data or renders the page.

The `@/` import alias maps to app/ (this framework's source root), so shared modules like @/lib/auth resolve under app/ — the one path prefix that differs from Next's src/, which is why the auth slice's mount code is framework-specific.

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.

Hosted: Supabase owns identity in its managed auth.users. This stack emits a LOCAL `user` mirror (db/auth-schema.ts) so app-type schemas can foreign-key `user` directly — keep it in sync with a Supabase trigger on auth.users (insert/update → public.user). The drizzle migration only owns the mirror table's shape, not the trigger.

Sessions are cookie-based (@supabase/ssr): the proxy refreshes them on every request; Server Components read the user via supabase.auth.getUser().

Both the follow edge (follower_id + following_id composite PK + unique) and the like edge (post_id + user_id composite PK + unique) carry explicit unique constraints — the constraint is the identity, not just a performance index.

Better Auth's user.id is text, not uuid; all four tables match that type on their FK columns rather than recasting, so joins never cross a type boundary.

Social network

Better Auth's user row is the account; profiles is the face that account shows. The split is deliberate: profiles.user_id is a unique text FK, so the mapping is strictly one-to-one, but posts.author_id, follows.follower_id, follows.following_id and post_likes.user_id all reference user.id rather than profiles.id. Authorship is keyed to the account, while the handle, bio and avatar are a separate row you join in for display. Every one of those FKs cascades on delete, so removing an account clears its profile, both directions of its follow edges, its posts and its likes in a single statement — there is no orphan sweep to write. The graph itself is two edge tables, and both make the edge its own identity.

follows has no surrogate key: (follower_id, following_id) is the primary key, and follows_follower_following_unique restates the same rule. You cannot follow the same account twice, and direction matters — following back inserts a second, separate row. post_likes is shaped identically, with (post_id, user_id) as the composite primary key plus post_likes_post_user_unique. Neither table caches a count; follower totals and like totals are aggregates over the edges themselves. The cost of that shape is worth knowing before you build on it. A home feed is fan-out-on-read: take the follower-side prefix of the follows primary key to get everyone a viewer follows, then read each author through idx_post_author.

posts carries only idx_post_author — no (author_id, created_at) composite and no index on created_at alone — so newest-first ordering is a sort on top of the index hit, which is fine at seed scale and the first thing to revisit under load. Likes read better: (post_id, user_id) leads with post_id, so counting a post's likes and answering whether the current viewer already liked it both ride the same key, and idx_post_likes_user runs the relation backwards for a liked-posts page. handle is unique and separately covered by idx_profile_handle, which is what keeps an /@name route a single-row lookup.

React Router v8

React Router v8 in framework mode puts everything under app/, and `@/` maps to that root instead of Next's src/ — the one prefix that differs, which is why shared modules like @/lib/auth and @/db/schema stay byte-identical to their Next counterparts. initCode writes app/lib/db.ts, then the auth fragment adds app/lib/auth.ts, the resource route app/routes/api.auth.$.ts, and app/lib/require-auth.ts. The route table itself is app/routes.ts: routes are declared configuration, and a file becomes a URL because that table says so. There are no React Server Components here. Every server-rendered route is a loader plus an ordinary client component: the loader runs on the server before render, the component reads its result with useLoaderData, and mutations go through an action read back with useActionData.

An API endpoint is the same module minus the default export — a resource route, named with the flat dotted convention (app/routes/api.auth.$.ts for the auth splat, app/routes/webhooks.polar.ts for a webhook POST). Auth gates in the loader rather than in a middleware layer. A protected route awaits requireAuth(request) from app/lib/require-auth.ts, which calls auth.api.getSession({ headers: request.headers }) — a real server-side validation, not a cookie peek — and throws redirect("/sign-in") when there is no session. React Router treats a thrown Response as the route's outcome, so the loader short-circuits and neither the protected query nor the component ever runs. The trade that follows: there is no matcher array to widen and no edge tier to keep honest, but protection is per-route discipline.

A new route is protected because its loader calls requireAuth; forget the call and the page is public. In return, every gate sits one function call away from the data it guards, the session is already in hand when the loader queries db, and the same request-in / Response-out contract covers pages, API endpoints and the auth mount alike.

Postgres (Neon)

Postgres here is Neon reached through postgres-js, with Drizzle's pg-core dialect on top: drizzle({ client }) over a single module-level postgres(DATABASE_URL, { prepare: false }). That flag is not a preference. Neon's pooled (-pooler) endpoint is PgBouncer in transaction mode, where a backend is handed to a different session between statements, so server-side prepared statements break across the pool — and the same constraint is why this axis pairs with Drizzle rather than Prisma. One client per module is enough: PgBouncer and the runtime do the pooling, so there is no globalThis singleton dance. The schemas built on this dialect make three recurring type decisions. Primary keys are uuid(...).primaryKey().defaultRandom(), so ids come from the database. Timestamps are timestamp(..., { withTimezone: true }).defaultNow() — timestamptz, an absolute instant.

Closed value sets are text plus a CHECK constraint rather than pgEnum, so shipping a new role or subscription status is an ordinary constraint change instead of an ALTER TYPE migration. Counters are bigint({ mode: "number" }), and Better Auth's text user.id is referenced as text by the app tables rather than recast. Operationally, transaction-mode pooling forbids anything that spans statements on one backend: LISTEN/NOTIFY, session-scoped SET, advisory-lock sessions, WITH HOLD cursors. Those paths use Neon's direct endpoint instead. The connection client also changes with the deploy target — max: 1 per short-lived serverless instance, a real reused pool (max 10, idle_timeout 20) in a long-running Node process, and on Cloudflare Workers postgres-js is replaced outright by @neondatabase/serverless over HTTP, because Workers have no TCP sockets.

The capability that exists only on this side of the matrix is row-level security. Multi-tenant schemas ship ENABLE plus FORCE ROW LEVEL SECURITY with policies keyed on current_setting('app.current_org_id', true), which withTenant() sets per transaction — unset context yields no rows, so isolation fails closed inside the database rather than in application code. It requires a dedicated NOBYPASSRLS role: Neon's default neondb_owner carries BYPASSRLS, and connecting as it makes every policy silently inert.

Supabase Auth

Supabase Auth is a hosted service — GoTrue — that your app reaches over cookies rather than an SDK session object. Credentials and the canonical user records live in Supabase's managed auth.users schema. What lands in your own database is a mirror: db/auth-schema.ts declares user keyed by the Supabase auth uid (text; varchar(255) on MySQL) with email, full name, avatar URL and timestamps, so app-type schemas can foreign-key user exactly as they would under a self-hosted auth. Unlike the Clerk fragment, no sync webhook is emitted here, because Supabase's own trigger mechanism is the intended path: a trigger on auth.users writing into public.user lives in the Supabase project, not in the drizzle migration.

The migration owns the mirror's column shape and nothing else, so wiring that trigger is a step you take before those foreign keys mean anything. The mechanic that actually shapes this adapter is cookie refresh. @supabase/ssr rotates the auth token, and a rotated cookie only reaches the browser if something writes it onto the outgoing response — which is why every framework branch is built around the same getAll/setAll pair, wired to whatever that framework calls a cookie jar. Next's src/proxy.ts rebuilds the NextResponse inside setAll before calling getUser().

React Router has no middleware layer, so app/lib/supabase/server.ts constructs the client per request and returns { supabase, headers }, and the protected layout route attaches those headers to both exits — the redirect and the pass-through — so a refresh that happened during a guard is not lost. Nuxt's server/utils/supabase.ts binds the client to the h3 event and writes through setCookie, with a Nitro middleware doing the guard. Every decision point calls supabase.auth.getUser(), never getSession(): getSession reads whatever the cookie claims, getUser revalidates it against Supabase. Because a browser client is emitted alongside the server one, the auth screens are real forms calling supabase.auth.signInWithPassword rather than a hosted widget, and the sidebar's user menu subscribes to onAuthStateChange. Two consequences to plan around.

The anon key is public by design and is inlined into the client bundle under whichever prefix the framework demands (NEXT_PUBLIC_, VITE_, NUXT_PUBLIC_), so protection has to come from row-level security on Supabase's side, not from keeping the key quiet. And every guard is a network call to Supabase, not a local query — cheap, but not free, and on the path of every protected request.