I initially created it in rails 5 with the --api tag.
From http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/api_app.html,
I removed config.api_only = true
config.api_only = true
So there's probably more things that will need to be done as I (you) go along, but to resolve the issue with stylesheets you need to manually create your views/layouts/application.html.erb and assets/stylesheets/application.css files.
views/layouts/application.html.erb
assets/stylesheets/application.css