Cleaned up ActivityPub boot noise when sibling service is offline

[9larsons]

Summary

In the default pnpm dev setup the sibling ActivityPub container isn't running, but Ghost's ActivityPubService.getWebhookSecret() still tries to hit http://localhost:2368/.ghost/activitypub/v1/site/ on boot. The dev Caddy gateway has no ACTIVITYPUB_PROXY_TARGET configured, so the request falls through to Ghost's frontend which returns an HTML 404 with status 200. res.json() then throws a SyntaxError parsing <!DOCTYPE ..., the catch logs ERROR Could not get webhook secret for ActivityPub ..., and initialiseWebhooks() then logs a second ERROR No webhook secret found - cannot initialise. Result: ~4 ERROR lines per nodemon boot for an expected dev-mode condition.

Changes

• getWebhookSecret() now discriminates on the error type:
  • FetchError (network failure) and SyntaxError (HTML masquerading as JSON) → log a single INFO with actionable wording and return null
  • anything else is rethrown so real production failures still surface
• The !secret branch in initialiseWebhooks() no longer re-logs — the upstream already covered it
• activity-pub-service-wrapper.js's configureActivityPub() got a try/catch so rethrown errors are logged at the wrapper level instead of becoming unhandled promise rejections (previously the all-swallowing catch made this safe)

Test plan

• Unit tests cover all three branches: FetchError silent, SyntaxError silent, unexpected error rethrown
• Unit test pins the no-double-log contract on the !secret path
• pnpm lint clean in ghost/core
• All 9 tests in activity-pub-service.test.ts pass

Caddy-side polish (deferred)

The audit also flagged that Caddy could 503 /.ghost/activitypub/* when ACTIVITYPUB_PROXY_TARGET is unset, preventing the HTML-as-JSON fallthrough at the gateway layer. The Ghost-side fix here makes the noise go away regardless of what Caddy returns, so the gateway change is left for a separate PR.

[nx-cloud]

🤖 Nx Cloud AI Fix

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☁️ Nx Cloud last updated this comment at 2026-06-30 12:10:12 UTC

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