The handleError hook lets you intercept unexpected errors and trigger some behaviour, like pinging a Slack channel or sending data to an error logging service.

As you’ll recall from an earlier exercise, an error is unexpected if it wasn’t created with the error helper from @sveltejs/kit. It generally means something in your app needs fixing. The default behaviour is to log the error:

export function handleError({ event, error }) {
	console.error(error.stack);
}

If you navigate to /the-bad-place, you’ll see this in action — the error page is shown, and if you open the terminal (using the button to the right of the URL bar), you’ll see the message from src/routes/the-bad-place/+page.server.js.

Notice that we’re not showing the error message to the user. That’s because error messages can include sensitive information that at best will confuse your users, and at worst could benefit evildoers. Instead, the error object available to your application — represented as $page.error in your +error.svelte pages, or %sveltekit.error% in your src/error.html fallback — is just this:

{
	message: 'Internal Error' // or 'Not Found' for a 404
}

In some situations you may want to customise this object. To do so, you can return an object from handleError:

export function handleError({ event, error }) {
	console.error(error.stack);

	return {
		message: 'everything is fine',
		code: 'JEREMYBEARIMY'
	};
}

You can now reference properties other than message in a custom error page. Create src/routes/+error.svelte:

<script>
	import { page } from '$app/stores';
</script>

<h1>{$page.status}</h1>
<p>{$page.error.message}</p>
<p>error code: {$page.error.code}</p>