Inject the gift-links service into the API controller at boot

[rob-ghost]

Problem

The gift-links API controller read its service from a mutable module export that is undefined until a boot-time init() ran, so every handler needed a non-null assertion. The service was also instantiated lazily inside its own module rather than wired by the boot sequence, so a future second dependant couldn't easily share the same instance.

Solution

Make boot the composition root: it constructs the service against the ready DB and passes it straight to the controller factory (createController(service)), which closes over a definite instance. The non-null assertions, the init() indirection, and the mutable service singleton all go away. The only shared slot is the built controller, which the API endpoints index reads — the framework loads controllers lazily, so the boot-built one has to live somewhere it can find.

Verified: typecheck and lint clean, and the e2e-api suite (which boots Ghost through this exact path) passes.

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☁️ Nx Cloud last updated this comment at 2026-06-22 20:24:05 UTC

[rob-ghost]

FYI @jonatansberg this is the sketch to show what's possible in order to get rid of the optional gift links service global and the ! operator. It requires putting the endpoint definition in a factory which depends on the service instance and calling that from boot.

Unfortunately it also means we need to have another endpoint singleton which is set as a result of calling createController because of how we lazily share references to all endpoints in the "api" singleton which is referenced all over the place.

I tried to also address this singleton but this blew up the scope completely, so I think this is the limit we can do right now in order to cleanup this service singleton.

One thing we might want to explore is putting the endpoint definitions into gift-links itself to co-locate, the same idea as the serialisers PR, which would help actually associate the serialisers with the shape of the endpoints, because right now the endpoints are off in some other place so its hard to associate the endpoint to the return value defined in the serialiser.

Shall we explore what that looks like here or in a follow up PR? Or accept this PR as it is? Or drop it entirely?

I personally like the idea of a gift-links/{endpoints,serializers,database,models,service}.ts