How to specify custom schema name?

[zoaha]

betterAuth defaults to the public schema, what if I wanted it have everything betterAuth related in its own schema?

(feel free to let me know if this is a bad idea somehow)

[dosubot[bot]]

Hi @zoaha! I'm Dosu and I'm helping the better-auth team.

Better Auth does not currently have a built-in configuration option to specify a custom PostgreSQL schema (e.g., auth.user instead of public.user). There's no schema option in the betterAuth() config or in any of the database adapters (Drizzle, Prisma, Kysely) [1].

What you can do today:

• Set search_path on your database connection — e.g., add ?search_path=auth to your connection string or configure it at the pool level. At runtime, Better Auth uses unqualified table names, so they'll resolve to whatever schema your search_path points to.
• Customize table names via modelName to add a prefix (e.g., auth_user, auth_session) if you just want logical separation within the public schema [2].

Known limitation: The Better Auth CLI's generate command produces bare CREATE TABLE user statements rather than schema-qualified CREATE TABLE auth.user, so generated migrations won't automatically target a custom schema [1]. You'd need to either manually qualify table names in the generated SQL or ensure your migration runner's connection uses the correct search_path.

It's not a bad idea — separating auth tables into their own schema is a common pattern — but it requires some manual setup today since native schema-namespace support isn't built in yet.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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