How to make a DELETE link to a rails resource?

Question

If I want to make a DELETE link in rails, I write the following code (in this example case to delete a user session in Devise):

<%= link_to('Logout', destroy_user_session_path, :method => :delete) %>

That will turn into the following HTML:

<a rel="nofollow" data-method="delete" href="/users/sign_out">Logout</a>

Works great, except I can't simply put that HTML into a static HTML page. It will simply do a GET request. I assume Rails includes some standard Javascript to turn the above link to one that actually does a DELETE request. So what's the proper way to have a link on a static HTML page to a Rails resource that does a DELETE action? Should I find and grab that Javascript Rails includes in all webpages that does this? Is there a better way?

Answer 1

You can't send a DELETE request with an anchor link, unfortunately - a traditional anchor link will only send a GET request. Actually, you can't really send a true DELETE request at all. If you want to make a delete link, without javascript, the solution is fairly easy. Check out 2.4 How do forms with PUT or DELETE methods work? in the official documentation. Basically, you can simply create a form that submits to the url of your resource, with a method of delete. It's pretty simple, and you don't need to rely on javascript to get the job done. Hope this helps, good luck.