It makes me appreciate working with languages that support pattern matching like Elixir.
I think this type of bug would have been preventable with pattern matching because that single controller function would have likely been split out into 2 functions that each matched against a specific HTTP method, and when the unmatched pattern came into play (the HEAD request) it would have failed to find a match and then threw an error instead of processing it as something else.
People create (for example) a get ‘/profile’ and a post ‘/profile’, and the action intended to correspond with post requests really just pattern matches against params.
I’ve also seen at least one app implement this properly, matching against the HTTP method as you described.
def profile(conn = %{method: "GET"}, params) do
# ...
end
def profile(conn = %{method: "POST"}, %{"user" => user_params) do
# ...
end
get "/profile", UserController, :profile, as: :user
post "/profile", UserController, :profile, as: :user
The above seems like the natural way to do it with Phoenix once you get a hang of pattern matching.