REST : return 'method not allowed' or not do the method?

Question

I'm building a restful API for my Symfony app.

I have a resource that can't be created via the API, so my first idea was to don't create the POST method/URI. But now I'm wondering if create the POST method and throw manually a 405 Method Not Allowed is not a better idea.

Has anybody an idea of the best solution?

Answer 1

In other frameworks - e.g. spring in java or django rest framework in python - it's done automatically. If an HTTP method isn't listed the framework will automatically return a 405 Method Not Allowed. It's very useful.

Personally I'd go for handling it manually - I mean returning a 405 Method Not Allowed - to be explicit about the error. This is not the case that route does not exist, hence 404 Not Found is a bad choice. It does exist, however not serving POST.

Even 403 Forbidden will be much better than 404 Not Found.