Laravel 5: AJAX Requests & Validation - laravel

Question

Laravel 5.2 docs state:
AJAX Requests & Validation
In this example, we used a traditional form to send data to the
application. However, many applications use AJAX requests. When using
the validate method during an AJAX request, Laravel will not generate
a redirect response. Instead, Laravel generates a JSON response
containing all of the validation errors. This JSON response will be
sent with a 422 HTTP status code.
Src: https://laravel.com/docs/5.2/validation#quick-ajax-requests-and-validation
However, this doesn't seem correct. A simple CURL call to a route using validation, still returns HTML/a redirect:
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json"
-H "Cache-Control: no-cache"
-d '{}' "http://yours.com/user/register"
The response of the above is HTML, and a redirect. It's not JSON.
Even this page: https://laravel.com/docs/5.2/requests#retrieving-input states:
Retrieving JSON Input Values
When sending JSON requests to your application, you may access the
JSON data via the input method as long as the Content-Type header of
the request is properly set to application/json.
So what have we missed? What is the solution?

Answer 1

You also seem to need the following header:
"X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest"
Thus:
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json"
-H "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest"
-H "Cache-Control: no-cache"
-d '{}' "http://yours.com/user/register"
And now $this->validate(...) is properly returning a JSON response.