Devise: Flash messages being set with Rails API

[rsiddle]

I'm using the Rails API (doesn't use Flash Middleware). I'm finding that when I try CURL'ing to the reset password the response appears to be in HTML format which is an error that says.

 <h2>undefined local variable or method `flash&#39; for #&lt;PasswordsController:0x007fbb11fcf598&gt;</h2>

HTML format has been disabled too which is why its a little strange that its trying to respond this way.

curl -X POST 'http://localhost:3001/users/password.json' -d 'user[email][email protected]'

class PasswordsController < Devise::PasswordsController

  respond_to :json
  respond_to :html, only: []
  respond_to :xml, only: []

end

Any thoughts as to why this might be happening?

[rsiddle]

Pry is showing the following:

pry(#<PasswordsController>)> successfully_sent?(resource)
NameError: undefined local variable or method `flash' for #<PasswordsController:0x007fbb0cdaaa10>

Which is from this line
https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/blob/f5f7e97d8bc368b87bdbcc0e4c4ecea3b7378684/app/controllers/devise_controller.rb#L126

Which is finally ending up here
https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/blob/c67de7e91cc3ea201c7cedc0ed71e1f6c76b2d36/lib/devise/controllers/helpers.rb#L186

When I look into that, the request is showing:

pry(#<PasswordsController>)> @request_format ||= request.format.try(:ref)
=> "*/*"

Which is set from the devise.rb initalizer. The advice here is that this is required for IE.
https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/blob/v3.1/lib/generators/templates/devise.rb#L225-L226

  # The "*/*" below is required to match Internet Explorer requests.
  # config.navigational_formats = ['*/*', :html]

I've actually got this set to json and the wildcard. I want to accept json only, but also need to factor in users with IE?

config.navigational_formats = ['*/*', :json]

If I remove the '_/_' and restart the server, I then get the following error with the same CURL

Redirected to 
Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 602ms

ArgumentError (Nil location provided. Can't build URI.):

If disabled all together then it seems to work from an AJAX call from the front end, however a CURL command still fails with

NameError (undefined local variable or method `flash' for #<PasswordsController:0x007f8f150ff040>):

[nashby]

@rsiddle you don't need to add :json to navigational_formats actually since it's not navigational format. So config.navigational_formats = ['*/*', :html] doesn't work for you, right?

[rsiddle]

I'm looking to remove HTML all together. At the moment its quite painful because I'm trying to remove it all manually

[josevalim]

Yeah, if you send an explicit format (like json or js), it should work as it stop being considered navigational.

[jonlemmon]

Defining the format as json in routes.rb worked well for me:

devise_for :users, defaults: { format: :json }