Community RESTful HATEOAS Best Practices

Comprehensive guide to building REST APIs that reach the Glory of REST (Richardson Maturity Level 3) in Ruby on Rails. Contains 47 rules across 9 categories, ordered by the request/response lifecycle — from resource URI design through hypermedia link relations to API evolution.

When to Apply

Reference these guidelines when:

• Designing new REST API endpoints and resource URIs
• Adding hypermedia controls (_links, affordances) to API responses
• Implementing content negotiation with HAL, JSON:API, or vendor media types
• Building paginated, filterable, sortable collection endpoints
• Reviewing APIs for proper HTTP method semantics and status codes
• Evolving APIs without breaking existing clients

Rule Categories by Priority