Rails controller doesn’t render any templates

I have a question about a rails 7 project I’m starting. I have a controller HomeController with one action home.

class HomeController < ApplicationController
  def home
    render
  end
end

I have a root route

 root to: "home#home"

And a view file app/views/home/home.html.erb

<% debugger %>

hello this is here

My app/views/layouts/application.html.erb is pretty standard:

<% debugger %>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Chargemaster</title>
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1">
    <%= csrf_meta_tags %>
    <%= csp_meta_tag %>

    <%= stylesheet_link_tag "application", "data-turbo-track": "reload" %>
    <%= javascript_importmap_tags %>
  </head>

  <body>
    hello
    <%= yield %>
  </body>
</html>

When I run rails s and try to hit the home route, I get an empty page. The output tells me it was processed as HTML and completed ok:

Started GET "/" for ::1 at 2024-06-13 16:29:12 -0700
Processing by HomeController#home as HTML
Completed 200 OK in 0ms (Views: 0.1ms | ActiveRecord: 0.0ms | Allocations: 134)

But it doesn’t halt at any of the breakpoints and doesn’t display any text - neither the “hello” in application.html.erb or the “hello this is here” in home.html.erb. The rendered output looks like this:

<html>
<head>
<meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark"></head>
<body>
<pre style="word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </pre>
</body>
</html>

Why is this action not rendering the templates as I expect?

If it helps feel free to look at the codebase at https://github.com/fredwillmore/climate-control.

Solution

This is because your ApplicationController extends ActionController::API (i.e. light version for API controllers) instead of ActionController::Base.

In your app/controllers/application_controller.rb file you should change:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::API
  ...
end

To:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  ...
end