Deno desktop better auth

[tigawanna]

Hey guys, I've been looking at deno desktop for a project and was wondering what intergraton with better auth especially the oauth flows would loo like.
Bettre auth has a dedicated electron plugin buut i have a feeling a Deno implementation would be easier but can't find much info about how deep linking works in deno

[ryux1]

The Better Auth server can run in Deno, but @better-auth/electron is not a drop-in Deno Desktop client. Its client/main/preload pieces import Electron and provide Electron-specific protocol registration, IPC, secure storage, and browser launching.

There is also an important Deno Desktop limitation at the moment. You can register a scheme in deno.json:

{
  "desktop": {
    "app": {
      "deepLinks": ["com.example.app"]
    }
  }
}

However, current Deno main only writes the OS registration metadata. The implementation explicitly says that delivering the opened URL to the running app, single-instance forwarding, and the JavaScript open-url event are tracked separately: cli/tools/desktop.rs. So registration alone is not yet enough to complete a custom-scheme OAuth callback reliably in application code.

For now I would keep Better Auth on a normal web backend and use a system-browser authorization flow with PKCE and state. The return path needs to be either:

• a loopback listener bound to 127.0.0.1 on a temporary port; or
• a manual short-lived authorization-code handoff similar to Better Auth's documented Electron fallback.

The Electron server plugin/proxy flow may be reusable conceptually, but the Deno app side still needs a small native client implementation for browser launch, PKCE state, code exchange, and secure token storage. Do not embed an OAuth client secret in the desktop binary.

Once Deno exposes the pending open-url delivery path for both cold starts and an already-running process, the custom scheme can replace the temporary return mechanism. Until then, I would not build the authentication flow around desktop.app.deepLinks alone.