Today it happened to me that between REST API and client, response body came back empty even if it was set from REST API server.

We spent good 1 hour trying to solve this, and it turned out it was because of 204 response status.

204 status means the request was accepted and processed well, but no content is returned. It is in the series of 2xx, which is basically an okay sign.

Funny thing was, the message set from REST API server (which returned the 204 response) was well received when tested on Postman.

But when it was attempted with curl, body was empty.

In the end we changed 204 to 200 and solved the problem, but I came home and did some search to see why did this happened.

I’m still not entirely sure, but it seems like setting content-type might be another solution.

Anyways, it seems like the response status should never be taken lightly.