Fixed /gift returning HTTP 404

[sagzy]

ref https://linear.app/ghost/issue/BER-3662

Summary

Gift subscription redemption links live at /gift/<token>. The sub-app at ghost/core/core/server/web/gift-preview/ is mounted via frontendApp.lazyUse('/gift', ...) and currently captures every /gift* request — including the bare /gift and /gift/, which fall through to errorHandler.pageNotFound and produce a 404. That makes it impossible for a site owner to use /gift as a navigation link backed by a custom Ghost page or routes.yaml entry.

This PR removes the two terminating error-handler middlewares (and their now-unused imports) from the gift-preview sub-app. Tokenless requests now fall through into Ghost's normal frontend routing, where:

• a Ghost page with slug gift renders if one exists,
• a routes.yaml entry for /gift/ is honored if one exists,
• otherwise Ghost's standard themed 404 is served (same as any other unconfigured path).

The token-bearing redemption flow (/gift/<token>, /gift/<token>/image) is untouched.

Why this is safe

• Both controllers (giftPreview, giftPreviewImage) handle their own errors via try/catch and never propagate, so the sub-app's HTML error-handling stack was a dead path for any real request.
• shared/express.js already auto-registers sentry.errorHandler as the first error middleware on every sub-app, so removing the explicit handleHTMLResponse(sentry) does not drop Sentry coverage.
• Route patterns /:token and /:token/image still match tokened requests first, so the existing redemption and OG-image flows are byte-identical.

Test plan

• Existing unit tests in test/unit/server/web/gift-preview/controller.test.js still pass (controller is unchanged).
• New e2e-frontend smoke test in test/e2e-frontend/default-routes.test.js:
  • Creates a page with slug gift and asserts GET /gift/ returns 200 with that page's title — proves the sub-app no longer intercepts tokenless requests.
  • Asserts GET /gift/<unknown-token> still returns a 302 redirect to the homepage (existing controller fallback for invalid tokens — regression guard).
• pnpm lint:server and pnpm lint:test clean.

Manual verification

With pnpm dev running and the giftSubscriptions lab flag enabled:

• GET /gift/<valid-token> → 200 HTML with meta-refresh to /#/portal/gift/redeem/<token> (unchanged)
• GET /gift/<invalid-token> → 302 to homepage (unchanged)
• GET /gift/<valid-token>/image → 200 PNG (unchanged)
• GET /gift with no /gift page configured → themed Ghost 404 (was: bare sub-app 404)
• GET /gift/ with a custom page at slug gift → that page renders (was: 404)

[coderabbitai]

Walkthrough

This PR simplifies the gift-preview Express app by removing error handling middleware registrations (error-handler middleware and Sentry HTML error responses). The app now returns immediately after route setup without the previous error handling pipeline. Corresponding integration tests were added to verify that /gift/ renders a custom page and /gift/<invalid-token> produces the expected redirect behavior.

Suggested reviewers

• mike182uk

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Description check	✅ Passed	The pull request description clearly explains the change: removing error-handler middlewares from the gift-preview sub-app so tokenless requests fall through to Ghost's normal frontend routing, with detailed rationale, test plan, and manual verification steps.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title 'Fixed /gift returning HTTP 404' directly addresses the main change: removing error-handler middlewares to prevent tokenless /gift requests from returning 404, allowing them to fall through to normal frontend routing.

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✨ Finishing Touches

📝 Generate docstrings

• Create stacked PR
• Commit on current branch

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Commit unit tests in branch gift-subscriptions/preview-link-fix

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