Rendering nothing on 404 in a Ruby on Rails api

I’m working on a JSON api for fetching reviews from security.dxw.com/, using the rails-api gem. When a plugin hasn’t been reviewed, the api (naturally) returns a 404, but what should the body contain?

I could return something like { error: "Review not found" }, but I like things to be nice and clean, so I’d prefer to display nothing at all. I started out with an empty json array: {}, then scaled back to an even more minimal nil, but my colleague Philip pointed out to me that you can actually just tell Rails to render nothing at all:

def not_found
  render nothing: true, status: 404
end

Nice and clean.

One final thing – usually Rails infers the content type from the content itself. With an empty response, it defaults to a content type of text/html. To force it to return an application/json content type we could specify the format inline in that render call, but we can go one better and specify json as the default format in our routes file:

scope '/api', defaults: { format: :json } do
  # ...
end

EDIT:

Philip Potter points out in the comments that an empty body isn’t actually valid json (think about it: a json parser would fail). And on the same lines, it’s probably not valid html either. While it would be nice to send no Content-Type header at all, it turns out that this is added by Rack, and I’m not super-keen to write my own rack middleware layer for this.

text/plain seems like a reasonable compromise. Also I’ve more recently come across the head method which gives a more succinct way of sending a response without a body:

def not_found
  head 404, "content_type" => 'text/plain'
end