Render a view in Rails 5 API

Question

I generated an API-only rails app with Rails 5 via rails new <application-name> --api . I've decided I want to include a view for testing some things and am having issues getting a view to load.

I created a users/index.html.erb file with some text and my controller is now simply def index; end def index; end but there is nothing appearing when I hit the /users URL. I also tried commenting out the # config.api_only = true in config/application.rb but that didn't affect anything. Any suggestions on how to proceed?

Answer 1

You don't need to uncomment config.api_only = true for this purpose, just inherit your controller from ActionController::Base , or do it in your ApplicationController (default for common rails generation).

Code:

1. For this controller only YourController < ActionController::Base
2. For all apllication ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

Answer 2

this is from the ActionController::Metal docs https://apidock.com/rails/ActionController/Metal

it says:

ActionController::Metal by default provides no utilities for rendering >views, partials, or other responses aside from explicitly calling of >response_body=, content_type=, and status=. To add the render helpers >you're used to having in a normal controller, you can do the following:

 class HelloController < ActionController::Metal include AbstractController::Rendering include ActionView::Layouts append_view_path "#{Rails.root}/app/views" def index render "hello/index" end end

So I've tried it myself and adding just by adding the two modules actually work just fine when using it for ActionController::API