HTTP GET Request Status 204 Vs 404

Question

I have 2 resources User and Album. An user has a list of albums. To get albums there are 2 REST API.

1. user/{userId}/albums/{albumId} get album by albumId if not

Answer 1

When you ask for a specific resource, say a user, and the user doesn't exist, then you should return 404. For example, you have an API to retrieve a user using the following URL:

https://yourdomain.com/api/users/:userid

and a request is made to retrieve user 1234, that doesn't exist, then you should return 404. In this case, the client requested a resource that doesn't exist.

https://yourdomain.com/api/users/1234 
404

Now suppose you have an api that returns all users in the system using the following url:

https://yourdomain.com/api/users

If there are no users in the system, then, in this case, you should return 204.