Hosting

Environment variables

Set the following environment variables in your hosting environment:

.env

# Required in production — used to sign and verify sessions
BETTER_AUTH_SECRET=your-secret-here

# The public URL your Better Auth instance is reachable at
BETTER_AUTH_URL=https://your-app.example.com

Pass them to your Better Auth config:

config/better-auth.ts

import { betterAuth } from "better-auth";
import { strapiAdapter } from "@strapi-community/plugin-better-auth";

const auth = () =>
  betterAuth({
    database: strapiAdapter(),
    secret: process.env.BETTER_AUTH_SECRET,
    baseURL: process.env.BETTER_AUTH_URL,
    trustedOrigins: ['http://localhost:3000'],
    advanced: {
      database: {
        generateId: "serial",
      },
    },
  });

export default auth;

Strapi Cloud

When deploying to Strapi Cloud, the strapi build command runs during the deployment pipeline before environment variables like BETTER_AUTH_SECRET are available. This causes Better Auth to fail during the build because it tries to initialise with missing configuration.

Add an early return to skip initialisation during the build step:

config/better-auth.ts

import { betterAuth } from "better-auth";
import { strapiAdapter } from "@strapi-community/plugin-better-auth";

const auth = () => {
  // Skip initialisation during the Strapi Cloud build step
  if (process.env.npm_lifecycle_script === "strapi build") {
    return null;
  }

  return betterAuth({
    database: strapiAdapter(),
    secret: process.env.BETTER_AUTH_SECRET,
    baseURL: process.env.BETTER_AUTH_URL,
    trustedOrigins: ['http://localhost:3000'],
    advanced: {
      database: {
        generateId: "serial",
      },
    },
  });
};

export default auth;

The plugin handles a null return value from the factory and will skip Better Auth initialisation, allowing the build to complete successfully.