Postman is getting redirected for unknown reason and route not working/ Codeigniter 4

Question

I can see that postman is being redirected for some reason. I have just started using postman so not sure what a normal request would look like. When I make the following request;

POST https://development.example.com/Api/Register
form-data
KEY name
VALUE Thomas
KEY _method
VALUE PUT

For some reason it returns my top page of my website. When I look at the apache2 log file, I can see:

124.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [27/Feb/2022:09:08:36 +0000] "POST /Api/Register HTTP/1.1" 303 5724 "-" "PostmanRuntime/7.28.4"

124.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [27/Feb/2022:09:08:36 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 8185 "https://development.example.com/Api/Register" "PostmanRuntime/7.28.4"

When I access it through a web browser like chrome (and I cannot submit any values of course), I get below which is expected;

 {
   "status": 500,
   "message": {
       "name": "The name field is required",
       "email": "The email field is required",
       "password": "The password field is required.",
       "password_confirmation": "The password_confirmation field is required."
   },
   "error": true,
   "data": []
}

What am I doing wrong with POSTMAN please?

My Users controller is;

public function userRegister(){
    $user = new UserEntity($this->request->getPost());
    $user->startActivation();
    if ($this->UserModel->insert($user)){
        $this->sendActivationEmail($user);
        $response =[
            'status'    => 200,
            'message'   => 'User registed.  Check email to activate account.',
            'error'     => false,
            'data'      => []
        ];
    } else {
        $response =[
            'status'    => 500,
            'message'   => $this->UserModel->errors(),
            'error'     => true,
            'data'      => []
        ];
    }
    return $this->respondCreated($response);
}

What is also puzzling is that the route is NOT accessible via;

My routes file is;

$routes->group('Api', ["namespace" => 'App\Controllers\Api\v1'] , function($routes){
    $routes->post('Register', 'Users::userRegister');
});

https://development.example.com/Api/Register
Error;  Controller or its method is not found: \App\Controllers\Api\Register::index

https://development.example.com/Api/v1/Users/userRegister 
This will work and give correct error like way above.

Answer 1

The problem is that you're essentially making a PUT request in Postman (_method PUT), yet your route definition in the file app/Config/Routes.php only responds to POST requests ($routes->post('Register', 'Users::userRegister');).

To fix this, remove the _method POST request parameter from Postman:

POST https://development.example.com/Api/Register
form-data
KEY name
VALUE Thomas

Addendum

The seemingly POST Postman request in your question is being implicitly interpreted as a PUT request by the Codeigniter framework because of HTTP Method Spoofing.

HTTP Method Spoofing

When working with HTML forms you can only use GET or POST HTTP verbs. In most cases, this is just fine. However, to support REST-ful routing you need to support other, more correct, verbs, like DELETE or PUT. Since the browsers don’t support this, CodeIgniter provides you with a way to spoof the method that is being used. This allows you to make a POST request, but tell the application that it should be treated as a different request type.

To spoof the method, a hidden input is added to the form with the name of _method. It’s value is the HTTP verb that you want the request to be:

   <form action="" method="post">
       <input type="hidden" name="_method" value="PUT" />
   </form>

This form is converted into a PUT request and is a true PUT request as far as the routing and the IncomingRequest class are concerned.

The form that you are using must be a POST request. GET requests cannot be spoofed.