I'm getting this error using ngResource to call a REST API on Amazon Web Services:
XMLHttpRequest cannot load
http://server.apiurl.com:8000/s/login?login=facebook. Response to
preflight request doesn't pass access control check: No
'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested
resource. Origin 'http://localhost' is therefore not allowed access.
Error 405
Service:
socialMarkt.factory('loginService', ['$resource', function ($resource) {
var apiAddress = "http://server.apiurl.com:8000/s/login/";
return $resource(apiAddress, {
login: "facebook",
access_token: "#access_token",
facebook_id: "#facebook_id"
}, {
getUser: {
method: 'POST'
}
});
}]);
Controller:
[...]
loginService.getUser(JSON.stringify(fbObj)),
function (data) {
console.log(data);
},
function (result) {
console.error('Error', result.status);
}
[...]
I'm using Chrome. What else can I do in order to fix this problem?
I've even configured the server to accept headers from origin localhost.
You are running into CORS issues.
There are several ways to fix or workaround this.
Turn off CORS. For example: How to turn off CORS in Chrome
Use a plugin for your browser
Use a proxy, such as nginx. Example of how to set up
Go through the necessary setup for your server. This is more a factor of the web server you have loaded on your EC2 instance (presuming this is what you mean by "Amazon web service"). For your specific server, you can refer to the enable CORS website.
More verbosely, you are trying to access api.serverurl.com from localhost. This is the exact definition of a cross-domain request.
By either turning it off just to get your work done (OK, but poor security for you if you visit other sites and just kicks the can down the road) or you can use a proxy which makes your browser think all requests come from the local host when really you have a local server that then calls the remote server.
So api.serverurl.com might become localhost:8000/api, and your local nginx or other proxy will send to the correct destination.
Now by popular demand, 100% more CORS information—the same great taste!
Bypassing CORS is exactly what is shown for those simply learning the front end.
HTTP Example with Promises
My "API Server" is a PHP application, so to solve this problem I found the below solution to work:
Place these lines in file index.php:
header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *');
header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, PATCH, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS');
header('Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Origin, Content-Type, X-Auth-Token');
In ASP.NET Core Web API, this issue got fixed by adding "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Cors" (ver 1.1.1) and adding the below changes in Startup.cs.
public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
services.AddCors(options =>
{
options.AddPolicy("AllowAllHeaders",
builder =>
{
builder.AllowAnyOrigin()
.AllowAnyHeader()
.AllowAnyMethod();
});
});
.
.
.
}
and
public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env, ILoggerFactory loggerFactory)
{
// Shows UseCors with named policy.
app.UseCors("AllowAllHeaders");
.
.
.
}
And putting [EnableCors("AllowAllHeaders")] in the controller.
There are some caveats when it comes to CORS. First, it does not allow wildcards *, but don't hold me on this one. I've read it somewhere, and I can't find the article now.
If you are making requests from a different domain, you need to add the allow origin headers.
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: www.other.com
If you are making requests that affect server resources like POST/PUT/PATCH, and if the MIME type is different than the following application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, or text/plain the browser will automatically make a pre-flight OPTIONS request to check with the server if it would allow it.
So your API/server needs to handle these OPTIONS requests accordingly, you need to respond with the appropriate access control headers and the http response status code needs to be 200.
The headers should be something like this, adjust them for your needs:
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, POST, DELETE, OPTIONS
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type
Access-Control-Max-Age: 86400
The max-age header is important, in my case, it wouldn't work without it, I guess the browser needs the info for how long the "access rights" are valid.
In addition, if you are making e.g. a POST request with application/json mime from a different domain you also need to add the previously mentioned allow origin header, so it would look like this:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: www.other.com
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, POST, DELETE, OPTIONS
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type
Access-Control-Max-Age: 86400
When the pre-flight succeeds and gets all the needed information your actual request will be made.
Generally speaking, whatever Access-Control headers are requested in the initial or pre-flight request, should be given in the response in order for it to work.
There is a good example in the MDN documentation here on this link, and you should also check out this Stack Overflow post.
If you're writing a Chrome extension
In the manifest.json file, you have to add the permissions for your domain(s).
"permissions": [
"http://example.com/*",
"https://example.com/*",
"http://www.example.com/*",
"https://www.example.com/*"
]
JavaScript XMLHttpRequest and Fetch follow the same-origin policy. So,
a web application using XMLHttpRequest or Fetch could only make HTTP
requests to its own domain.
Source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Access_control_CORS
You have to send the Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * HTTP header from your server side.
If you are using Apache as your HTTP server then you can add it to your Apache configuration file like this:
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
</IfModule>
Mod_headers is enabled by default in Apache, however, you may want to ensure it's enabled by running:
a2enmod headers
In PHP you can add the headers:
<?php
header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *");
header("Access-Control-Expose-Headers: Content-Length, X-JSON");
header("Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, PATCH, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS");
header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers: *");
...
To fix cross-origin-requests issues in a Node.js application:
npm i cors
And simply add the lines below to the app.js file:
let cors = require('cors')
app.use(cors())
If you are using the IIS server by chance, you can set the below headers in the HTTP request headers option.
Access-Control-Allow-Origin:*
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: 'HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE'
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: 'Origin, Content-Type, X-Auth-Token';
With this all POST, GET, etc., will work fine.
In my Apache VirtualHost configuration file, I have added following lines:
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Methods "POST, GET, OPTIONS, DELETE, PUT"
Header always set Access-Control-Max-Age "1000"
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Headers "x-requested-with, Content-Type, origin, authorization, accept, client-security-token"
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} OPTIONS
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1 [R=200,L]
Our team occasionally sees this using Vue.js, Axios and a C# Web API. Adding a route attribute on the endpoint you're trying to hit fixes it for us.
[Route("ControllerName/Endpoint")]
[HttpOptions, HttpPost]
public IHttpActionResult Endpoint() { }
For a Python Flask server, you can use the flask-cors plugin to enable cross domain requests.
See: Flask-CORS
For anyone using API Gateway's HTTP API and the proxy route ANY /{proxy+}
You will need to explicitly define your route methods in order for CORS to work.
I wish this was more explicit in the AWS documentation for configuring CORS for an HTTP API
I was on a two-hour call with AWS support and they looped in one of their senior HTTP API developers, who made this recommendation.
For those who are using Lambda Integrated Proxy with API Gateway, you need configure your lambda function as if you are submitting your requests to it directly, meaning the function should set up the response headers properly. (If you are using custom lambda functions, this will be handled by the API Gateway.)
// In your lambda's index.handler():
exports.handler = (event, context, callback) => {
// On success:
callback(null, {
statusCode: 200,
headers: {
"Access-Control-Allow-Origin" : "*"
}
}
}
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is an HTTP-header based mechanism that allows a server to indicate any origins (domain, scheme, or port) other than its own from which a browser should permit loading of resources
From Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)
In short - the web server tells you (your browser) which sites you should trust for using that site.
Scammysite.bad tries to tell your browser to send a request to good-api-site.good
good-api-site.good tells your browser it should only trust other-good-site.good
Your browser says that you really should not trust scammysite.bad's request to good-api-site.good and goes CORS saved you.
If you are creating a site, and you really don't care who integrates with you. Plow on. Set * in your ACL.
However, if you are creating a site, and only site X, or even site X, Y and Z should be allowed, you use CORS to instruct the client's browser to only trust these sites to integrate with your site.
Browsers can of course choose to ignore this. Again, CORS protects your client - not you.
CORS allows * or one site defined. This can limit you, but you can get around this by adding some dynamic configuration to your web server - and help you being specific.
This is an example on how to configure CORS per site is in Apache:
# Save the entire "Origin" header in Apache environment variable "AccessControlAllowOrigin"
# Expand the regex to match your desired "good" sites / sites you trust
SetEnvIfNoCase Origin "^https://(other-good-site\.good|one-more-good.site)$" AccessControlAllowOrigin=$0
# Assuming you server multiple sites, ensure you apply only to this specific site
<If "%{HTTP_HOST} == 'good-api-site.com'">
# Remove headers to ensure that they are explicitly set
Header unset Access-Control-Allow-Origin env=AccessControlAllowOrigin
Header unset Access-Control-Allow-Methods env=AccessControlAllowOrigin
Header unset Access-Control-Allow-Headers env=AccessControlAllowOrigin
Header unset Access-Control-Expose-Headers env=AccessControlAllowOrigin
# Add headers "always" to ensure that they are explicitly set
# The value of the "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" header will be the contents saved in the "AccessControlAllowOrigin" environment variable
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Origin %{AccessControlAllowOrigin}e env=AccessControlAllowOrigin
# Adapt the below to your use case
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Methods "POST, GET, OPTIONS, PUT" env=AccessControlAllowOrigin
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Headers "X-Requested-With,Authorization" env=AccessControlAllowOrigin
Header always set Access-Control-Expose-Headers "X-Requested-With,Authorization" env=AccessControlAllowOrigin
</If>
I think disabling CORS from Chrome is not good way, because if you are using it in Ionic, certainly in a mobile build the issue will raise again.
So better to fix in your backend.
First of all, in the header, you need to set-
header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *');
header('Header set Access-Control-Allow-Headers: "Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Accept"');
And if the API is behaving as both GET and POST, then also set in your header-
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'OPTIONS') { if
(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCESS_CONTROL_REQUEST_METHOD']))
header("Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, OPTIONS");
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCESS_CONTROL_REQUEST_HEADERS']))
header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers:
{$_SERVER['HTTP_ACCESS_CONTROL_REQUEST_HEADERS']}"); exit(0); }
A very common cause of this error could be that the host API had mapped the request to an HTTP method (e.g., PUT) and the API client is calling the API using a different http method (e.g., POST or GET).
Using the CORS option in the API gateway, I used the following settings shown above.
Also, note, that your function must return a HTTP status 200 in response to an OPTIONS request, or else CORS will also fail.
I am using AWS SDK for uploads, and after spending some time searching online, I stumbled upon this question. Thanks to #lsimoneau 45581857, it turns out the exact same thing was happening.
I simply pointed my request URL to the region on my bucket by attaching the region option and it worked.
const s3 = new AWS.S3({
accessKeyId: config.awsAccessKeyID,
secretAccessKey: config.awsSecretAccessKey,
region: 'eu-west-2' // add region here });
I have faced this problem when the DNS server was set to 8.8.8.8 (Google's). Actually, the problem was in the router. My application tried to connect with the server through Google, not locally (for my particular case).
I have removed 8.8.8.8 and this solved the issue. I know that this issues solved by CORS settings, but maybe someone will have the same trouble as me.
Check if request is going to correct endpoint. In my Node.js project, I mentioned incorrect endpoint, the request was going to /api/txn/12345, the endpoint was /api/txn instead of /api/txn/:txnId, that led to this error.
It's easy to solve this issue just with a few steps easily, without worrying about anything.
Kindly, follow the steps to solve it.
open (https://www.npmjs.com/package/cors#enabling-cors-pre-flight)
go to installation and copy the command npm install cors to install via Node.js in a terminal
go to Simple Usage (Enable All CORS Requests) by scrolling. Then copy and paste the complete declaration in your project and run it...that will work for sure...
copy the comment code and paste in your app.js or any other project and give a try...this will work. This will unlock every cross origin resource sharing...so we can switch between servers for your use
The stand-alone distributions of GeoServer include the Jetty application server. Enable cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) to allow JavaScript applications outside of your own domain to use GeoServer.
Uncomment the following <filter> and <filter-mapping> from webapps/geoserver/WEB-INF/web.xml:
<web-app>
<filter>
<filter-name>cross-origin</filter-name>
<filter-class>org.eclipse.jetty.servlets.CrossOriginFilter</filter-class>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>cross-origin</filter-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
</web-app>
The "Response to preflight request doesn't pass access control check" is exactly what the problem is:
Before issuing the actual GET request, the browser is checking if the service is correctly configured for CORS. This is done by checking if the service accepts the methods and headers going to be used by the actual request. Therefore, it is not enough to allow the service to be accessed from a different origin, but also the additional requisites must be fulfilled.
Setting headers to
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Origin: www.example.com
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, POST, DELETE, OPTIONS
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type #etc...
will not suffice. You have to add a rewrite rule:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} OPTIONS
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1 [R=200,L]
A great read Response for preflight does not have HTTP ok status.
I made it work, adding the OPTIONS method to Access-Control-Allow-Methods:
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, OPTIONS
But!, again, this works in Chrome and Firefox, but sadly not in Chromium.
Something that is very easy to miss...
In Solution Explorer, right-click api-project. In the properties window, set 'Anonymous Authentication' to Enabled!!!
Disable the Chrome security.
Create a Chrome shortcut: right click → Properties → Target. Paste this: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disable-web-security --user-data-dir="c:/chromedev"
Related
Apparently, I have completely misunderstood its semantics. I thought of something like this:
A client downloads JavaScript code MyCode.js from http://siteA - the origin.
The response header of MyCode.js contains Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteB, which I thought meant that MyCode.js was allowed to make cross-origin references to the site B.
The client triggers some functionality of MyCode.js, which in turn make requests to http://siteB, which should be fine, despite being cross-origin requests.
Well, I am wrong. It does not work like this at all. So, I have read Cross-origin resource sharing and attempted to read Cross-Origin Resource Sharing in w3c recommendation.
One thing is sure - I still do not understand how I am supposed to use this header.
I have full control of both site A and site B. How do I enable the JavaScript code downloaded from the site A to access resources on the site B using this header?
P.S.: I do not want to utilize JSONP.
Access-Control-Allow-Origin is a CORS (cross-origin resource sharing) header.
When Site A tries to fetch content from Site B, Site B can send an Access-Control-Allow-Origin response header to tell the browser that the content of this page is accessible to certain origins. (An origin is a domain, plus a scheme and port number.) By default, Site B's pages are not accessible to any other origin; using the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header opens a door for cross-origin access by specific requesting origins.
For each resource/page that Site B wants to make accessible to Site A, Site B should serve its pages with the response header:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteA.com
Modern browsers will not block cross-domain requests outright. If Site A requests a page from Site B, the browser will actually fetch the requested page on the network level and check if the response headers list Site A as a permitted requester domain. If Site B has not indicated that Site A is allowed to access this page, the browser will trigger the XMLHttpRequest's error event and deny the response data to the requesting JavaScript code.
Non-simple requests
What happens on the network level can be slightly more complex than explained above. If the request is a "non-simple" request, the browser first sends a data-less "preflight" OPTIONS request, to verify that the server will accept the request. A request is non-simple when either (or both):
using an HTTP verb other than GET or POST (e.g. PUT, DELETE)
using non-simple request headers; the only simple requests headers are:
Accept
Accept-Language
Content-Language
Content-Type (this is only simple when its value is application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, or text/plain)
If the server responds to the OPTIONS preflight with appropriate response headers (Access-Control-Allow-Headers for non-simple headers, Access-Control-Allow-Methods for non-simple verbs) that match the non-simple verb and/or non-simple headers, then the browser sends the actual request.
Supposing that Site A wants to send a PUT request for /somePage, with a non-simple Content-Type value of application/json, the browser would first send a preflight request:
OPTIONS /somePage HTTP/1.1
Origin: http://siteA.com
Access-Control-Request-Method: PUT
Access-Control-Request-Headers: Content-Type
Note that Access-Control-Request-Method and Access-Control-Request-Headers are added by the browser automatically; you do not need to add them. This OPTIONS preflight gets the successful response headers:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteA.com
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, PUT
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type
When sending the actual request (after preflight is done), the behavior is identical to how a simple request is handled. In other words, a non-simple request whose preflight is successful is treated the same as a simple request (i.e., the server must still send Access-Control-Allow-Origin again for the actual response).
The browsers sends the actual request:
PUT /somePage HTTP/1.1
Origin: http://siteA.com
Content-Type: application/json
{ "myRequestContent": "JSON is so great" }
And the server sends back an Access-Control-Allow-Origin, just as it would for a simple request:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteA.com
See Understanding XMLHttpRequest over CORS for a little more information about non-simple requests.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing - CORS (A.K.A. Cross-Domain AJAX request) is an issue that most web developers might encounter, according to Same-Origin-Policy, browsers restrict client JavaScript in a security sandbox, usually JS cannot directly communicate with a remote server from a different domain. In the past developers created many tricky ways to achieve Cross-Domain resource request, most commonly using ways are:
Use Flash/Silverlight or server side as a "proxy" to communicate
with remote.
JSON With Padding (JSONP).
Embeds remote server in an iframe and communicate through fragment or window.name, refer here.
Those tricky ways have more or less some issues, for example JSONP might result in security hole if developers simply "eval" it, and #3 above, although it works, both domains should build strict contract between each other, it neither flexible nor elegant IMHO:)
W3C had introduced Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) as a standard solution to provide a safe, flexible and a recommended standard way to solve this issue.
The Mechanism
From a high level we can simply deem CORS as a contract between client AJAX call from domain A and a page hosted on domain B, a typical Cross-Origin request/response would be:
DomainA AJAX request headers
Host DomainB.com
User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Accept text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8,application/json
Accept-Language en-us;
Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate
Keep-Alive 115
Origin http://DomainA.com
DomainB response headers
Cache-Control private
Content-Type application/json; charset=utf-8
Access-Control-Allow-Origin DomainA.com
Content-Length 87
Proxy-Connection Keep-Alive
Connection Keep-Alive
The blue parts I marked above were the kernal facts, "Origin" request header "indicates where the cross-origin request or preflight request originates from", the "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" response header indicates this page allows remote request from DomainA (if the value is * indicate allows remote requests from any domain).
As I mentioned above, W3 recommended browser to implement a "preflight request" before submiting the actually Cross-Origin HTTP request, in a nutshell it is an HTTP OPTIONS request:
OPTIONS DomainB.com/foo.aspx HTTP/1.1
If foo.aspx supports OPTIONS HTTP verb, it might return response like below:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2011 15:38:19 GMT
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://DomainA.com
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST, GET, OPTIONS, HEAD
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: X-Requested-With
Access-Control-Max-Age: 1728000
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: application/json
Only if the response contains "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" AND its value is "*" or contain the domain who submitted the CORS request, by satisfying this mandtory condition browser will submit the actual Cross-Domain request, and cache the result in "Preflight-Result-Cache".
I blogged about CORS three years ago: AJAX Cross-Origin HTTP request
According to this Mozilla Developer Network article,
A resource makes a cross-origin HTTP request when it requests a resource from a different domain, or port than the one which the first resource itself serves.
An HTML page served from http://domain-a.com makes an <img> src request for http://domain-b.com/image.jpg.
Many pages on the web today load resources like CSS style sheets, images and scripts from separate domains (thus it should be cool).
Same-Origin Policy
For security reasons, browsers restrict cross-origin HTTP requests initiated from within scripts.
For example, XMLHttpRequest and Fetch follow the same-origin policy.
So, a web application using XMLHttpRequest or Fetch could only make HTTP requests to its own domain.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)
To improve web applications, developers asked browser vendors to allow cross-domain requests.
The Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) mechanism gives web servers cross-domain access controls, which enable secure cross-domain data transfers.
Modern browsers use CORS in an API container - such as XMLHttpRequest or fetch - to mitigate risks of cross-origin HTTP requests.
How CORS works (Access-Control-Allow-Origin header)
Wikipedia:
The CORS standard describes new HTTP headers which provide browsers and servers a way to request remote URLs only when they have permission.
Although some validation and authorization can be performed by the server, it is generally the browser's responsibility to support these headers and honor the restrictions they impose.
Example
The browser sends the OPTIONS request with an Origin HTTP header.
The value of this header is the domain that served the parent page. When a page from http://www.example.com attempts to access a user's data in service.example.com, the following request header would be sent to service.example.com:
Origin: http://www.example.com
The server at service.example.com may respond with:
An Access-Control-Allow-Origin (ACAO) header in its response indicating which origin sites are allowed.
For example:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://www.example.com
An error page if the server does not allow the cross-origin request
An Access-Control-Allow-Origin (ACAO) header with a wildcard that allows all domains:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Whenever I start thinking about CORS, my intuition about which site hosts the headers is incorrect, just as you described in your question. For me, it helps to think about the purpose of the same-origin policy.
The purpose of the same-origin policy is to protect you from malicious JavaScript on siteA.com accessing private information you've chosen to share only with siteB.com. Without the same-origin policy, JavaScript written by the authors of siteA.com could have your browser make requests to siteB.com, using your authentication cookies for siteB.com. In this way, siteA.com could steal the secret information you share with siteB.com.
Sometimes you need to work cross domain, which is where CORS comes in. CORS relaxes the same-origin policy for siteB.com, using the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to list other domains (siteA.com) that are trusted to run JavaScript that can interact with siteB.com.
To understand which domain should serve the CORS headers, consider this. You visit malicious.com, which contains some JavaScript that tries to make a cross domain request to mybank.com. It should be up to mybank.com, not malicious.com, to decide whether or not it sets CORS headers that relax the same-origin policy, allowing the JavaScript from malicious.com to interact with it. If malicous.com could set its own CORS headers allowing its own JavaScript access to mybank.com, this would completely nullify the same-origin policy.
I think the reason for my bad intuition is the point of view I have when developing a site. It's my site, with all my JavaScript. Therefore, it isn't doing anything malicious, and it should be up to me to specify which other sites my JavaScript can interact with. When in fact I should be thinking: Which other sites' JavaScript are trying to interact with my site and should I use CORS to allow them?
From my own experience, it's hard to find a simple explanation why CORS is even a concern.
Once you understand why it's there, the headers and discussion becomes a lot clearer. I'll give it a shot in a few lines.
It's all about cookies. Cookies are stored on a client by their domain.
An example story: On your computer, there's a cookie for yourbank.com. Maybe your session is in there.
Key point: When a client makes a request to the server, it will send the cookies stored under the domain for that request.
You're logged in on your browser to yourbank.com. You request to see all your accounts, and cookies are sent for yourbank.com. yourbank.com receives the pile of cookies and sends back its response (your accounts).
If another client makes a cross origin request to a server, those cookies are sent along, just as before. Ruh roh.
You browse to malicious.com. Malicious makes a bunch of requests to different banks, including yourbank.com.
Since the cookies are validated as expected, the server will authorize the response.
Those cookies get gathered up and sent along - and now, malicious.com has a response from yourbank.
Yikes.
So now, a few questions and answers become apparent:
"Why don't we just block the browser from doing that?" Yep. That's CORS.
"How do we get around it?" Have the server tell the request that CORS is OK.
1. A client downloads javascript code MyCode.js from http://siteA - the origin.
The code that does the downloading - your html script tag or xhr from javascript or whatever - came from, let's say, http://siteZ. And, when the browser requests MyCode.js, it sends an Origin: header saying "Origin: http://siteZ", because it can see that you're requesting to siteA and siteZ != siteA. (You cannot stop or interfere with this.)
2. The response header of MyCode.js contains Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteB, which I thought meant that MyCode.js was allowed to make cross-origin references to the site B.
no. It means, Only siteB is allowed to do this request. So your request for MyCode.js from siteZ gets an error instead, and the browser typically gives you nothing. But if you make your server return A-C-A-O: siteZ instead, you'll get MyCode.js . Or if it sends '*', that'll work, that'll let everybody in. Or if the server always sends the string from the Origin: header... but... for security, if you're afraid of hackers, your server should only allow origins on a shortlist, that are allowed to make those requests.
Then, MyCode.js comes from siteA. When it makes requests to siteB, they are all cross-origin, the browser sends Origin: siteA, and siteB has to take the siteA, recognize it's on the short list of allowed requesters, and send back A-C-A-O: siteA. Only then will the browser let your script get the result of those requests.
Using React and Axios, join a proxy link to the URL and add a header as shown below:
https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/ + Your API URL
Just adding the proxy link will work, but it can also throw an error for No Access again. Hence it is better to add a header as shown below.
axios.get(`https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/[YOUR_API_URL]`,{headers: {'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*'}})
.then(response => console.log(response:data);
}
Warning: Not to be used in production
This is just a quick fix. If you're struggling with why you're not able to get a response, you can use this.
But again it's not the best answer for production.
If you are using PHP, try adding the following code at the beginning of the php file:
If you are using localhost, try this:
header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *");
If you are using external domains such as server, try this:
header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://www.website.com");
I worked with Express.js 4, Node.js 7.4 and Angular, and I had the same problem. This helped me:
a) server side: in file app.js I add headers to all responses, like:
app.use(function(req, res, next) {
res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', req.headers.origin);
res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Accept");
next();
});
This must be before all routes.
I saw a lot of added this headers:
res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers","*");
res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Credentials', true);
res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods', 'GET,PUT,POST,DELETE');
But I don’t need that,
b) client side: in sending by Ajax, you need to add "withCredentials: true," like:
$http({
method: 'POST',
url: 'url',
withCredentials: true,
data : {}
}).then(function(response){
// Code
}, function (response) {
// Code
});
If you want just to test a cross-domain application in which the browser blocks your request, then you can just open your browser in unsafe mode and test your application without changing your code and without making your code unsafe.
From macOS, you can do this from the terminal line:
open -a Google\ Chrome --args --disable-web-security --user-data-dir
In Python, I have been using the Flask-CORS library with great success. It makes dealing with CORS super easy and painless. I added some code from the library's documentation below.
Installing:
pip install -U flask-cors
Simple example that allows CORS for all domains on all routes:
from flask import Flask
from flask_cors import CORS
app = Flask(__name__)
CORS(app)
#app.route("/")
def helloWorld():
return "Hello, cross-origin-world!"
For more specific examples, see the documentation. I have used the simple example above to get around the CORS issue in an Ionic application I am building that has to access a separate flask server.
Simply paste the following code in your web.config file.
Noted that, you have to paste the following code under <system.webServer> tag
<httpProtocol>
<customHeaders>
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Origin" value="*" />
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Headers" value="Content-Type" />
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Methods" value="GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS" />
</customHeaders>
</httpProtocol>
I can't configure it on the back-end server, but with these extensions in the browsers, it works for me:
For Firefox:
CORS Everywhere
For Google Chrome:
Allow CORS: Access-Control-Allow-Origin
Note: CORS works for me with this configuration:
For cross origin sharing, set header: 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin':'*';
Php: header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin':'*');
Node: app.use('Access-Control-Allow-Origin':'*');
This will allow to share content for different domain.
Nginx and Apache
As an addition to apsiller's answer, I would like to add a wiki graph which shows when a request is simple or not (and OPTIONS pre-flight request is send or not)
For a simple request (e.g., hotlinking images), you don't need to change your server configuration files, but you can add headers in the application (hosted on the server, e.g., in PHP) like Melvin Guerrero mentions in his answer - but remember: if you add full CORS headers in your server (configuration) and at same time you allow simple CORS in the application (e.g., PHP), this will not work at all.
And here are configurations for two popular servers:
turn on CORS on Nginx (nginx.conf file)
location ~ ^/index\.php(/|$) {
...
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' "$http_origin" always; # if you change "$http_origin" to "*" you shoud get same result - allow all domain to CORS (but better change it to your particular domain)
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true' always;
if ($request_method = OPTIONS) {
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' "$http_origin"; # DO NOT remove THIS LINES (doubled with outside 'if' above)
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';
add_header 'Access-Control-Max-Age' 1728000; # cache preflight value for 20 days
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET, POST, OPTIONS'; # arbitrary methods
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'My-First-Header,My-Second-Header,Authorization,Content-Type,Accept,Origin'; # arbitrary headers
add_header 'Content-Length' 0;
add_header 'Content-Type' 'text/plain charset=UTF-8';
return 204;
}
}
turn on CORS on Apache (.htaccess file)
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# | Cross-domain Ajax requests |
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Enable cross-origin Ajax requests.
# http://code.google.com/p/html5security/wiki/CrossOriginRequestSecurity
# http://enable-cors.org/
# change * (allow any domain) below to your domain
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Methods "POST, GET, OPTIONS, DELETE, PUT"
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Headers "My-First-Header,My-Second-Header,Authorization, content-type, csrf-token"
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Credentials "true"
The Access-Control-Allow-Origin response header indicates whether the
response can be shared with requesting code from the given origin.
Header type Response header
-------------------------------------------
Forbidden header name no
A response that tells the browser to allow code from any origin to
access a resource will include the following:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
For more information, visit Access-Control-Allow-Origin...
For .NET Core 3.1 API With Angular
Startup.cs : Add CORS
//SERVICES
public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services){
//CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing)
//=====================================
services.AddCors();
}
//MIDDLEWARES
public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IWebHostEnvironment env)
{
app.UseRouting();
//ORDER: CORS -> Authentication -> Authorization)
//CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing)
//=====================================
app.UseCors(x=>x.AllowAnyHeader().AllowAnyMethod().WithOrigins("http://localhost:4200"));
app.UseHttpsRedirection();
}
}
Controller : Enable CORS For Authorized Controller
//Authorize all methods inside this controller
[Authorize]
[EnableCors()]
public class UsersController : ControllerBase
{
//ActionMethods
}
Note: Only a temporary solution for testing
For those who can't control the backend for Options 405 Method Not Allowed, here is a workaround for theChrome browser.
Execute in the command line:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disable-web-security --user-data-dir="path_to_profile"
Example:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disable-web-security --user-data-dir="C:\Users\vital\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Profile 2"
Most CORS issues are because you are trying to request via client side ajax from a react, angular, jquery apps that are frontend basic libs.
You must request from a backend application.
You are trying to request from a frontend API, but the API you are trying to consume is expecting this request to be made from a backend application and it will never accept client side requests.
Apparently, I have completely misunderstood its semantics. I thought of something like this:
A client downloads JavaScript code MyCode.js from http://siteA - the origin.
The response header of MyCode.js contains Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteB, which I thought meant that MyCode.js was allowed to make cross-origin references to the site B.
The client triggers some functionality of MyCode.js, which in turn make requests to http://siteB, which should be fine, despite being cross-origin requests.
Well, I am wrong. It does not work like this at all. So, I have read Cross-origin resource sharing and attempted to read Cross-Origin Resource Sharing in w3c recommendation.
One thing is sure - I still do not understand how I am supposed to use this header.
I have full control of both site A and site B. How do I enable the JavaScript code downloaded from the site A to access resources on the site B using this header?
P.S.: I do not want to utilize JSONP.
Access-Control-Allow-Origin is a CORS (cross-origin resource sharing) header.
When Site A tries to fetch content from Site B, Site B can send an Access-Control-Allow-Origin response header to tell the browser that the content of this page is accessible to certain origins. (An origin is a domain, plus a scheme and port number.) By default, Site B's pages are not accessible to any other origin; using the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header opens a door for cross-origin access by specific requesting origins.
For each resource/page that Site B wants to make accessible to Site A, Site B should serve its pages with the response header:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteA.com
Modern browsers will not block cross-domain requests outright. If Site A requests a page from Site B, the browser will actually fetch the requested page on the network level and check if the response headers list Site A as a permitted requester domain. If Site B has not indicated that Site A is allowed to access this page, the browser will trigger the XMLHttpRequest's error event and deny the response data to the requesting JavaScript code.
Non-simple requests
What happens on the network level can be slightly more complex than explained above. If the request is a "non-simple" request, the browser first sends a data-less "preflight" OPTIONS request, to verify that the server will accept the request. A request is non-simple when either (or both):
using an HTTP verb other than GET or POST (e.g. PUT, DELETE)
using non-simple request headers; the only simple requests headers are:
Accept
Accept-Language
Content-Language
Content-Type (this is only simple when its value is application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, or text/plain)
If the server responds to the OPTIONS preflight with appropriate response headers (Access-Control-Allow-Headers for non-simple headers, Access-Control-Allow-Methods for non-simple verbs) that match the non-simple verb and/or non-simple headers, then the browser sends the actual request.
Supposing that Site A wants to send a PUT request for /somePage, with a non-simple Content-Type value of application/json, the browser would first send a preflight request:
OPTIONS /somePage HTTP/1.1
Origin: http://siteA.com
Access-Control-Request-Method: PUT
Access-Control-Request-Headers: Content-Type
Note that Access-Control-Request-Method and Access-Control-Request-Headers are added by the browser automatically; you do not need to add them. This OPTIONS preflight gets the successful response headers:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteA.com
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, PUT
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type
When sending the actual request (after preflight is done), the behavior is identical to how a simple request is handled. In other words, a non-simple request whose preflight is successful is treated the same as a simple request (i.e., the server must still send Access-Control-Allow-Origin again for the actual response).
The browsers sends the actual request:
PUT /somePage HTTP/1.1
Origin: http://siteA.com
Content-Type: application/json
{ "myRequestContent": "JSON is so great" }
And the server sends back an Access-Control-Allow-Origin, just as it would for a simple request:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteA.com
See Understanding XMLHttpRequest over CORS for a little more information about non-simple requests.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing - CORS (A.K.A. Cross-Domain AJAX request) is an issue that most web developers might encounter, according to Same-Origin-Policy, browsers restrict client JavaScript in a security sandbox, usually JS cannot directly communicate with a remote server from a different domain. In the past developers created many tricky ways to achieve Cross-Domain resource request, most commonly using ways are:
Use Flash/Silverlight or server side as a "proxy" to communicate
with remote.
JSON With Padding (JSONP).
Embeds remote server in an iframe and communicate through fragment or window.name, refer here.
Those tricky ways have more or less some issues, for example JSONP might result in security hole if developers simply "eval" it, and #3 above, although it works, both domains should build strict contract between each other, it neither flexible nor elegant IMHO:)
W3C had introduced Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) as a standard solution to provide a safe, flexible and a recommended standard way to solve this issue.
The Mechanism
From a high level we can simply deem CORS as a contract between client AJAX call from domain A and a page hosted on domain B, a typical Cross-Origin request/response would be:
DomainA AJAX request headers
Host DomainB.com
User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Accept text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8,application/json
Accept-Language en-us;
Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate
Keep-Alive 115
Origin http://DomainA.com
DomainB response headers
Cache-Control private
Content-Type application/json; charset=utf-8
Access-Control-Allow-Origin DomainA.com
Content-Length 87
Proxy-Connection Keep-Alive
Connection Keep-Alive
The blue parts I marked above were the kernal facts, "Origin" request header "indicates where the cross-origin request or preflight request originates from", the "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" response header indicates this page allows remote request from DomainA (if the value is * indicate allows remote requests from any domain).
As I mentioned above, W3 recommended browser to implement a "preflight request" before submiting the actually Cross-Origin HTTP request, in a nutshell it is an HTTP OPTIONS request:
OPTIONS DomainB.com/foo.aspx HTTP/1.1
If foo.aspx supports OPTIONS HTTP verb, it might return response like below:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2011 15:38:19 GMT
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://DomainA.com
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST, GET, OPTIONS, HEAD
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: X-Requested-With
Access-Control-Max-Age: 1728000
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: application/json
Only if the response contains "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" AND its value is "*" or contain the domain who submitted the CORS request, by satisfying this mandtory condition browser will submit the actual Cross-Domain request, and cache the result in "Preflight-Result-Cache".
I blogged about CORS three years ago: AJAX Cross-Origin HTTP request
According to this Mozilla Developer Network article,
A resource makes a cross-origin HTTP request when it requests a resource from a different domain, or port than the one which the first resource itself serves.
An HTML page served from http://domain-a.com makes an <img> src request for http://domain-b.com/image.jpg.
Many pages on the web today load resources like CSS style sheets, images and scripts from separate domains (thus it should be cool).
Same-Origin Policy
For security reasons, browsers restrict cross-origin HTTP requests initiated from within scripts.
For example, XMLHttpRequest and Fetch follow the same-origin policy.
So, a web application using XMLHttpRequest or Fetch could only make HTTP requests to its own domain.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)
To improve web applications, developers asked browser vendors to allow cross-domain requests.
The Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) mechanism gives web servers cross-domain access controls, which enable secure cross-domain data transfers.
Modern browsers use CORS in an API container - such as XMLHttpRequest or fetch - to mitigate risks of cross-origin HTTP requests.
How CORS works (Access-Control-Allow-Origin header)
Wikipedia:
The CORS standard describes new HTTP headers which provide browsers and servers a way to request remote URLs only when they have permission.
Although some validation and authorization can be performed by the server, it is generally the browser's responsibility to support these headers and honor the restrictions they impose.
Example
The browser sends the OPTIONS request with an Origin HTTP header.
The value of this header is the domain that served the parent page. When a page from http://www.example.com attempts to access a user's data in service.example.com, the following request header would be sent to service.example.com:
Origin: http://www.example.com
The server at service.example.com may respond with:
An Access-Control-Allow-Origin (ACAO) header in its response indicating which origin sites are allowed.
For example:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://www.example.com
An error page if the server does not allow the cross-origin request
An Access-Control-Allow-Origin (ACAO) header with a wildcard that allows all domains:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Whenever I start thinking about CORS, my intuition about which site hosts the headers is incorrect, just as you described in your question. For me, it helps to think about the purpose of the same-origin policy.
The purpose of the same-origin policy is to protect you from malicious JavaScript on siteA.com accessing private information you've chosen to share only with siteB.com. Without the same-origin policy, JavaScript written by the authors of siteA.com could have your browser make requests to siteB.com, using your authentication cookies for siteB.com. In this way, siteA.com could steal the secret information you share with siteB.com.
Sometimes you need to work cross domain, which is where CORS comes in. CORS relaxes the same-origin policy for siteB.com, using the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to list other domains (siteA.com) that are trusted to run JavaScript that can interact with siteB.com.
To understand which domain should serve the CORS headers, consider this. You visit malicious.com, which contains some JavaScript that tries to make a cross domain request to mybank.com. It should be up to mybank.com, not malicious.com, to decide whether or not it sets CORS headers that relax the same-origin policy, allowing the JavaScript from malicious.com to interact with it. If malicous.com could set its own CORS headers allowing its own JavaScript access to mybank.com, this would completely nullify the same-origin policy.
I think the reason for my bad intuition is the point of view I have when developing a site. It's my site, with all my JavaScript. Therefore, it isn't doing anything malicious, and it should be up to me to specify which other sites my JavaScript can interact with. When in fact I should be thinking: Which other sites' JavaScript are trying to interact with my site and should I use CORS to allow them?
From my own experience, it's hard to find a simple explanation why CORS is even a concern.
Once you understand why it's there, the headers and discussion becomes a lot clearer. I'll give it a shot in a few lines.
It's all about cookies. Cookies are stored on a client by their domain.
An example story: On your computer, there's a cookie for yourbank.com. Maybe your session is in there.
Key point: When a client makes a request to the server, it will send the cookies stored under the domain for that request.
You're logged in on your browser to yourbank.com. You request to see all your accounts, and cookies are sent for yourbank.com. yourbank.com receives the pile of cookies and sends back its response (your accounts).
If another client makes a cross origin request to a server, those cookies are sent along, just as before. Ruh roh.
You browse to malicious.com. Malicious makes a bunch of requests to different banks, including yourbank.com.
Since the cookies are validated as expected, the server will authorize the response.
Those cookies get gathered up and sent along - and now, malicious.com has a response from yourbank.
Yikes.
So now, a few questions and answers become apparent:
"Why don't we just block the browser from doing that?" Yep. That's CORS.
"How do we get around it?" Have the server tell the request that CORS is OK.
1. A client downloads javascript code MyCode.js from http://siteA - the origin.
The code that does the downloading - your html script tag or xhr from javascript or whatever - came from, let's say, http://siteZ. And, when the browser requests MyCode.js, it sends an Origin: header saying "Origin: http://siteZ", because it can see that you're requesting to siteA and siteZ != siteA. (You cannot stop or interfere with this.)
2. The response header of MyCode.js contains Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteB, which I thought meant that MyCode.js was allowed to make cross-origin references to the site B.
no. It means, Only siteB is allowed to do this request. So your request for MyCode.js from siteZ gets an error instead, and the browser typically gives you nothing. But if you make your server return A-C-A-O: siteZ instead, you'll get MyCode.js . Or if it sends '*', that'll work, that'll let everybody in. Or if the server always sends the string from the Origin: header... but... for security, if you're afraid of hackers, your server should only allow origins on a shortlist, that are allowed to make those requests.
Then, MyCode.js comes from siteA. When it makes requests to siteB, they are all cross-origin, the browser sends Origin: siteA, and siteB has to take the siteA, recognize it's on the short list of allowed requesters, and send back A-C-A-O: siteA. Only then will the browser let your script get the result of those requests.
Using React and Axios, join a proxy link to the URL and add a header as shown below:
https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/ + Your API URL
Just adding the proxy link will work, but it can also throw an error for No Access again. Hence it is better to add a header as shown below.
axios.get(`https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/[YOUR_API_URL]`,{headers: {'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*'}})
.then(response => console.log(response:data);
}
Warning: Not to be used in production
This is just a quick fix. If you're struggling with why you're not able to get a response, you can use this.
But again it's not the best answer for production.
If you are using PHP, try adding the following code at the beginning of the php file:
If you are using localhost, try this:
header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *");
If you are using external domains such as server, try this:
header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://www.website.com");
I worked with Express.js 4, Node.js 7.4 and Angular, and I had the same problem. This helped me:
a) server side: in file app.js I add headers to all responses, like:
app.use(function(req, res, next) {
res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', req.headers.origin);
res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Accept");
next();
});
This must be before all routes.
I saw a lot of added this headers:
res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers","*");
res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Credentials', true);
res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods', 'GET,PUT,POST,DELETE');
But I don’t need that,
b) client side: in sending by Ajax, you need to add "withCredentials: true," like:
$http({
method: 'POST',
url: 'url',
withCredentials: true,
data : {}
}).then(function(response){
// Code
}, function (response) {
// Code
});
If you want just to test a cross-domain application in which the browser blocks your request, then you can just open your browser in unsafe mode and test your application without changing your code and without making your code unsafe.
From macOS, you can do this from the terminal line:
open -a Google\ Chrome --args --disable-web-security --user-data-dir
In Python, I have been using the Flask-CORS library with great success. It makes dealing with CORS super easy and painless. I added some code from the library's documentation below.
Installing:
pip install -U flask-cors
Simple example that allows CORS for all domains on all routes:
from flask import Flask
from flask_cors import CORS
app = Flask(__name__)
CORS(app)
#app.route("/")
def helloWorld():
return "Hello, cross-origin-world!"
For more specific examples, see the documentation. I have used the simple example above to get around the CORS issue in an Ionic application I am building that has to access a separate flask server.
Simply paste the following code in your web.config file.
Noted that, you have to paste the following code under <system.webServer> tag
<httpProtocol>
<customHeaders>
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Origin" value="*" />
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Headers" value="Content-Type" />
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Methods" value="GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS" />
</customHeaders>
</httpProtocol>
I can't configure it on the back-end server, but with these extensions in the browsers, it works for me:
For Firefox:
CORS Everywhere
For Google Chrome:
Allow CORS: Access-Control-Allow-Origin
Note: CORS works for me with this configuration:
For cross origin sharing, set header: 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin':'*';
Php: header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin':'*');
Node: app.use('Access-Control-Allow-Origin':'*');
This will allow to share content for different domain.
Nginx and Apache
As an addition to apsiller's answer, I would like to add a wiki graph which shows when a request is simple or not (and OPTIONS pre-flight request is send or not)
For a simple request (e.g., hotlinking images), you don't need to change your server configuration files, but you can add headers in the application (hosted on the server, e.g., in PHP) like Melvin Guerrero mentions in his answer - but remember: if you add full CORS headers in your server (configuration) and at same time you allow simple CORS in the application (e.g., PHP), this will not work at all.
And here are configurations for two popular servers:
turn on CORS on Nginx (nginx.conf file)
location ~ ^/index\.php(/|$) {
...
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' "$http_origin" always; # if you change "$http_origin" to "*" you shoud get same result - allow all domain to CORS (but better change it to your particular domain)
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true' always;
if ($request_method = OPTIONS) {
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' "$http_origin"; # DO NOT remove THIS LINES (doubled with outside 'if' above)
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';
add_header 'Access-Control-Max-Age' 1728000; # cache preflight value for 20 days
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET, POST, OPTIONS'; # arbitrary methods
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'My-First-Header,My-Second-Header,Authorization,Content-Type,Accept,Origin'; # arbitrary headers
add_header 'Content-Length' 0;
add_header 'Content-Type' 'text/plain charset=UTF-8';
return 204;
}
}
turn on CORS on Apache (.htaccess file)
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# | Cross-domain Ajax requests |
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Enable cross-origin Ajax requests.
# http://code.google.com/p/html5security/wiki/CrossOriginRequestSecurity
# http://enable-cors.org/
# change * (allow any domain) below to your domain
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Methods "POST, GET, OPTIONS, DELETE, PUT"
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Headers "My-First-Header,My-Second-Header,Authorization, content-type, csrf-token"
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Credentials "true"
The Access-Control-Allow-Origin response header indicates whether the
response can be shared with requesting code from the given origin.
Header type Response header
-------------------------------------------
Forbidden header name no
A response that tells the browser to allow code from any origin to
access a resource will include the following:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
For more information, visit Access-Control-Allow-Origin...
For .NET Core 3.1 API With Angular
Startup.cs : Add CORS
//SERVICES
public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services){
//CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing)
//=====================================
services.AddCors();
}
//MIDDLEWARES
public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IWebHostEnvironment env)
{
app.UseRouting();
//ORDER: CORS -> Authentication -> Authorization)
//CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing)
//=====================================
app.UseCors(x=>x.AllowAnyHeader().AllowAnyMethod().WithOrigins("http://localhost:4200"));
app.UseHttpsRedirection();
}
}
Controller : Enable CORS For Authorized Controller
//Authorize all methods inside this controller
[Authorize]
[EnableCors()]
public class UsersController : ControllerBase
{
//ActionMethods
}
Note: Only a temporary solution for testing
For those who can't control the backend for Options 405 Method Not Allowed, here is a workaround for theChrome browser.
Execute in the command line:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disable-web-security --user-data-dir="path_to_profile"
Example:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disable-web-security --user-data-dir="C:\Users\vital\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Profile 2"
Most CORS issues are because you are trying to request via client side ajax from a react, angular, jquery apps that are frontend basic libs.
You must request from a backend application.
You are trying to request from a frontend API, but the API you are trying to consume is expecting this request to be made from a backend application and it will never accept client side requests.
Apparently, I have completely misunderstood its semantics. I thought of something like this:
A client downloads JavaScript code MyCode.js from http://siteA - the origin.
The response header of MyCode.js contains Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteB, which I thought meant that MyCode.js was allowed to make cross-origin references to the site B.
The client triggers some functionality of MyCode.js, which in turn make requests to http://siteB, which should be fine, despite being cross-origin requests.
Well, I am wrong. It does not work like this at all. So, I have read Cross-origin resource sharing and attempted to read Cross-Origin Resource Sharing in w3c recommendation.
One thing is sure - I still do not understand how I am supposed to use this header.
I have full control of both site A and site B. How do I enable the JavaScript code downloaded from the site A to access resources on the site B using this header?
P.S.: I do not want to utilize JSONP.
Access-Control-Allow-Origin is a CORS (cross-origin resource sharing) header.
When Site A tries to fetch content from Site B, Site B can send an Access-Control-Allow-Origin response header to tell the browser that the content of this page is accessible to certain origins. (An origin is a domain, plus a scheme and port number.) By default, Site B's pages are not accessible to any other origin; using the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header opens a door for cross-origin access by specific requesting origins.
For each resource/page that Site B wants to make accessible to Site A, Site B should serve its pages with the response header:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteA.com
Modern browsers will not block cross-domain requests outright. If Site A requests a page from Site B, the browser will actually fetch the requested page on the network level and check if the response headers list Site A as a permitted requester domain. If Site B has not indicated that Site A is allowed to access this page, the browser will trigger the XMLHttpRequest's error event and deny the response data to the requesting JavaScript code.
Non-simple requests
What happens on the network level can be slightly more complex than explained above. If the request is a "non-simple" request, the browser first sends a data-less "preflight" OPTIONS request, to verify that the server will accept the request. A request is non-simple when either (or both):
using an HTTP verb other than GET or POST (e.g. PUT, DELETE)
using non-simple request headers; the only simple requests headers are:
Accept
Accept-Language
Content-Language
Content-Type (this is only simple when its value is application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, or text/plain)
If the server responds to the OPTIONS preflight with appropriate response headers (Access-Control-Allow-Headers for non-simple headers, Access-Control-Allow-Methods for non-simple verbs) that match the non-simple verb and/or non-simple headers, then the browser sends the actual request.
Supposing that Site A wants to send a PUT request for /somePage, with a non-simple Content-Type value of application/json, the browser would first send a preflight request:
OPTIONS /somePage HTTP/1.1
Origin: http://siteA.com
Access-Control-Request-Method: PUT
Access-Control-Request-Headers: Content-Type
Note that Access-Control-Request-Method and Access-Control-Request-Headers are added by the browser automatically; you do not need to add them. This OPTIONS preflight gets the successful response headers:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteA.com
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, PUT
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type
When sending the actual request (after preflight is done), the behavior is identical to how a simple request is handled. In other words, a non-simple request whose preflight is successful is treated the same as a simple request (i.e., the server must still send Access-Control-Allow-Origin again for the actual response).
The browsers sends the actual request:
PUT /somePage HTTP/1.1
Origin: http://siteA.com
Content-Type: application/json
{ "myRequestContent": "JSON is so great" }
And the server sends back an Access-Control-Allow-Origin, just as it would for a simple request:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteA.com
See Understanding XMLHttpRequest over CORS for a little more information about non-simple requests.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing - CORS (A.K.A. Cross-Domain AJAX request) is an issue that most web developers might encounter, according to Same-Origin-Policy, browsers restrict client JavaScript in a security sandbox, usually JS cannot directly communicate with a remote server from a different domain. In the past developers created many tricky ways to achieve Cross-Domain resource request, most commonly using ways are:
Use Flash/Silverlight or server side as a "proxy" to communicate
with remote.
JSON With Padding (JSONP).
Embeds remote server in an iframe and communicate through fragment or window.name, refer here.
Those tricky ways have more or less some issues, for example JSONP might result in security hole if developers simply "eval" it, and #3 above, although it works, both domains should build strict contract between each other, it neither flexible nor elegant IMHO:)
W3C had introduced Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) as a standard solution to provide a safe, flexible and a recommended standard way to solve this issue.
The Mechanism
From a high level we can simply deem CORS as a contract between client AJAX call from domain A and a page hosted on domain B, a typical Cross-Origin request/response would be:
DomainA AJAX request headers
Host DomainB.com
User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Accept text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8,application/json
Accept-Language en-us;
Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate
Keep-Alive 115
Origin http://DomainA.com
DomainB response headers
Cache-Control private
Content-Type application/json; charset=utf-8
Access-Control-Allow-Origin DomainA.com
Content-Length 87
Proxy-Connection Keep-Alive
Connection Keep-Alive
The blue parts I marked above were the kernal facts, "Origin" request header "indicates where the cross-origin request or preflight request originates from", the "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" response header indicates this page allows remote request from DomainA (if the value is * indicate allows remote requests from any domain).
As I mentioned above, W3 recommended browser to implement a "preflight request" before submiting the actually Cross-Origin HTTP request, in a nutshell it is an HTTP OPTIONS request:
OPTIONS DomainB.com/foo.aspx HTTP/1.1
If foo.aspx supports OPTIONS HTTP verb, it might return response like below:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2011 15:38:19 GMT
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://DomainA.com
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST, GET, OPTIONS, HEAD
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: X-Requested-With
Access-Control-Max-Age: 1728000
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: application/json
Only if the response contains "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" AND its value is "*" or contain the domain who submitted the CORS request, by satisfying this mandtory condition browser will submit the actual Cross-Domain request, and cache the result in "Preflight-Result-Cache".
I blogged about CORS three years ago: AJAX Cross-Origin HTTP request
According to this Mozilla Developer Network article,
A resource makes a cross-origin HTTP request when it requests a resource from a different domain, or port than the one which the first resource itself serves.
An HTML page served from http://domain-a.com makes an <img> src request for http://domain-b.com/image.jpg.
Many pages on the web today load resources like CSS style sheets, images and scripts from separate domains (thus it should be cool).
Same-Origin Policy
For security reasons, browsers restrict cross-origin HTTP requests initiated from within scripts.
For example, XMLHttpRequest and Fetch follow the same-origin policy.
So, a web application using XMLHttpRequest or Fetch could only make HTTP requests to its own domain.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)
To improve web applications, developers asked browser vendors to allow cross-domain requests.
The Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) mechanism gives web servers cross-domain access controls, which enable secure cross-domain data transfers.
Modern browsers use CORS in an API container - such as XMLHttpRequest or fetch - to mitigate risks of cross-origin HTTP requests.
How CORS works (Access-Control-Allow-Origin header)
Wikipedia:
The CORS standard describes new HTTP headers which provide browsers and servers a way to request remote URLs only when they have permission.
Although some validation and authorization can be performed by the server, it is generally the browser's responsibility to support these headers and honor the restrictions they impose.
Example
The browser sends the OPTIONS request with an Origin HTTP header.
The value of this header is the domain that served the parent page. When a page from http://www.example.com attempts to access a user's data in service.example.com, the following request header would be sent to service.example.com:
Origin: http://www.example.com
The server at service.example.com may respond with:
An Access-Control-Allow-Origin (ACAO) header in its response indicating which origin sites are allowed.
For example:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://www.example.com
An error page if the server does not allow the cross-origin request
An Access-Control-Allow-Origin (ACAO) header with a wildcard that allows all domains:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Whenever I start thinking about CORS, my intuition about which site hosts the headers is incorrect, just as you described in your question. For me, it helps to think about the purpose of the same-origin policy.
The purpose of the same-origin policy is to protect you from malicious JavaScript on siteA.com accessing private information you've chosen to share only with siteB.com. Without the same-origin policy, JavaScript written by the authors of siteA.com could have your browser make requests to siteB.com, using your authentication cookies for siteB.com. In this way, siteA.com could steal the secret information you share with siteB.com.
Sometimes you need to work cross domain, which is where CORS comes in. CORS relaxes the same-origin policy for siteB.com, using the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to list other domains (siteA.com) that are trusted to run JavaScript that can interact with siteB.com.
To understand which domain should serve the CORS headers, consider this. You visit malicious.com, which contains some JavaScript that tries to make a cross domain request to mybank.com. It should be up to mybank.com, not malicious.com, to decide whether or not it sets CORS headers that relax the same-origin policy, allowing the JavaScript from malicious.com to interact with it. If malicous.com could set its own CORS headers allowing its own JavaScript access to mybank.com, this would completely nullify the same-origin policy.
I think the reason for my bad intuition is the point of view I have when developing a site. It's my site, with all my JavaScript. Therefore, it isn't doing anything malicious, and it should be up to me to specify which other sites my JavaScript can interact with. When in fact I should be thinking: Which other sites' JavaScript are trying to interact with my site and should I use CORS to allow them?
From my own experience, it's hard to find a simple explanation why CORS is even a concern.
Once you understand why it's there, the headers and discussion becomes a lot clearer. I'll give it a shot in a few lines.
It's all about cookies. Cookies are stored on a client by their domain.
An example story: On your computer, there's a cookie for yourbank.com. Maybe your session is in there.
Key point: When a client makes a request to the server, it will send the cookies stored under the domain for that request.
You're logged in on your browser to yourbank.com. You request to see all your accounts, and cookies are sent for yourbank.com. yourbank.com receives the pile of cookies and sends back its response (your accounts).
If another client makes a cross origin request to a server, those cookies are sent along, just as before. Ruh roh.
You browse to malicious.com. Malicious makes a bunch of requests to different banks, including yourbank.com.
Since the cookies are validated as expected, the server will authorize the response.
Those cookies get gathered up and sent along - and now, malicious.com has a response from yourbank.
Yikes.
So now, a few questions and answers become apparent:
"Why don't we just block the browser from doing that?" Yep. That's CORS.
"How do we get around it?" Have the server tell the request that CORS is OK.
1. A client downloads javascript code MyCode.js from http://siteA - the origin.
The code that does the downloading - your html script tag or xhr from javascript or whatever - came from, let's say, http://siteZ. And, when the browser requests MyCode.js, it sends an Origin: header saying "Origin: http://siteZ", because it can see that you're requesting to siteA and siteZ != siteA. (You cannot stop or interfere with this.)
2. The response header of MyCode.js contains Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteB, which I thought meant that MyCode.js was allowed to make cross-origin references to the site B.
no. It means, Only siteB is allowed to do this request. So your request for MyCode.js from siteZ gets an error instead, and the browser typically gives you nothing. But if you make your server return A-C-A-O: siteZ instead, you'll get MyCode.js . Or if it sends '*', that'll work, that'll let everybody in. Or if the server always sends the string from the Origin: header... but... for security, if you're afraid of hackers, your server should only allow origins on a shortlist, that are allowed to make those requests.
Then, MyCode.js comes from siteA. When it makes requests to siteB, they are all cross-origin, the browser sends Origin: siteA, and siteB has to take the siteA, recognize it's on the short list of allowed requesters, and send back A-C-A-O: siteA. Only then will the browser let your script get the result of those requests.
Using React and Axios, join a proxy link to the URL and add a header as shown below:
https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/ + Your API URL
Just adding the proxy link will work, but it can also throw an error for No Access again. Hence it is better to add a header as shown below.
axios.get(`https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/[YOUR_API_URL]`,{headers: {'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*'}})
.then(response => console.log(response:data);
}
Warning: Not to be used in production
This is just a quick fix. If you're struggling with why you're not able to get a response, you can use this.
But again it's not the best answer for production.
If you are using PHP, try adding the following code at the beginning of the php file:
If you are using localhost, try this:
header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *");
If you are using external domains such as server, try this:
header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://www.website.com");
I worked with Express.js 4, Node.js 7.4 and Angular, and I had the same problem. This helped me:
a) server side: in file app.js I add headers to all responses, like:
app.use(function(req, res, next) {
res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', req.headers.origin);
res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Accept");
next();
});
This must be before all routes.
I saw a lot of added this headers:
res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers","*");
res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Credentials', true);
res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods', 'GET,PUT,POST,DELETE');
But I don’t need that,
b) client side: in sending by Ajax, you need to add "withCredentials: true," like:
$http({
method: 'POST',
url: 'url',
withCredentials: true,
data : {}
}).then(function(response){
// Code
}, function (response) {
// Code
});
If you want just to test a cross-domain application in which the browser blocks your request, then you can just open your browser in unsafe mode and test your application without changing your code and without making your code unsafe.
From macOS, you can do this from the terminal line:
open -a Google\ Chrome --args --disable-web-security --user-data-dir
In Python, I have been using the Flask-CORS library with great success. It makes dealing with CORS super easy and painless. I added some code from the library's documentation below.
Installing:
pip install -U flask-cors
Simple example that allows CORS for all domains on all routes:
from flask import Flask
from flask_cors import CORS
app = Flask(__name__)
CORS(app)
#app.route("/")
def helloWorld():
return "Hello, cross-origin-world!"
For more specific examples, see the documentation. I have used the simple example above to get around the CORS issue in an Ionic application I am building that has to access a separate flask server.
Simply paste the following code in your web.config file.
Noted that, you have to paste the following code under <system.webServer> tag
<httpProtocol>
<customHeaders>
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Origin" value="*" />
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Headers" value="Content-Type" />
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Methods" value="GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS" />
</customHeaders>
</httpProtocol>
I can't configure it on the back-end server, but with these extensions in the browsers, it works for me:
For Firefox:
CORS Everywhere
For Google Chrome:
Allow CORS: Access-Control-Allow-Origin
Note: CORS works for me with this configuration:
For cross origin sharing, set header: 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin':'*';
Php: header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin':'*');
Node: app.use('Access-Control-Allow-Origin':'*');
This will allow to share content for different domain.
Nginx and Apache
As an addition to apsiller's answer, I would like to add a wiki graph which shows when a request is simple or not (and OPTIONS pre-flight request is send or not)
For a simple request (e.g., hotlinking images), you don't need to change your server configuration files, but you can add headers in the application (hosted on the server, e.g., in PHP) like Melvin Guerrero mentions in his answer - but remember: if you add full CORS headers in your server (configuration) and at same time you allow simple CORS in the application (e.g., PHP), this will not work at all.
And here are configurations for two popular servers:
turn on CORS on Nginx (nginx.conf file)
location ~ ^/index\.php(/|$) {
...
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' "$http_origin" always; # if you change "$http_origin" to "*" you shoud get same result - allow all domain to CORS (but better change it to your particular domain)
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true' always;
if ($request_method = OPTIONS) {
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' "$http_origin"; # DO NOT remove THIS LINES (doubled with outside 'if' above)
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';
add_header 'Access-Control-Max-Age' 1728000; # cache preflight value for 20 days
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET, POST, OPTIONS'; # arbitrary methods
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'My-First-Header,My-Second-Header,Authorization,Content-Type,Accept,Origin'; # arbitrary headers
add_header 'Content-Length' 0;
add_header 'Content-Type' 'text/plain charset=UTF-8';
return 204;
}
}
turn on CORS on Apache (.htaccess file)
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# | Cross-domain Ajax requests |
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Enable cross-origin Ajax requests.
# http://code.google.com/p/html5security/wiki/CrossOriginRequestSecurity
# http://enable-cors.org/
# change * (allow any domain) below to your domain
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Methods "POST, GET, OPTIONS, DELETE, PUT"
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Headers "My-First-Header,My-Second-Header,Authorization, content-type, csrf-token"
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Credentials "true"
The Access-Control-Allow-Origin response header indicates whether the
response can be shared with requesting code from the given origin.
Header type Response header
-------------------------------------------
Forbidden header name no
A response that tells the browser to allow code from any origin to
access a resource will include the following:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
For more information, visit Access-Control-Allow-Origin...
For .NET Core 3.1 API With Angular
Startup.cs : Add CORS
//SERVICES
public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services){
//CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing)
//=====================================
services.AddCors();
}
//MIDDLEWARES
public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IWebHostEnvironment env)
{
app.UseRouting();
//ORDER: CORS -> Authentication -> Authorization)
//CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing)
//=====================================
app.UseCors(x=>x.AllowAnyHeader().AllowAnyMethod().WithOrigins("http://localhost:4200"));
app.UseHttpsRedirection();
}
}
Controller : Enable CORS For Authorized Controller
//Authorize all methods inside this controller
[Authorize]
[EnableCors()]
public class UsersController : ControllerBase
{
//ActionMethods
}
Note: Only a temporary solution for testing
For those who can't control the backend for Options 405 Method Not Allowed, here is a workaround for theChrome browser.
Execute in the command line:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disable-web-security --user-data-dir="path_to_profile"
Example:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disable-web-security --user-data-dir="C:\Users\vital\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Profile 2"
Most CORS issues are because you are trying to request via client side ajax from a react, angular, jquery apps that are frontend basic libs.
You must request from a backend application.
You are trying to request from a frontend API, but the API you are trying to consume is expecting this request to be made from a backend application and it will never accept client side requests.
I am stuck with this CORS problem, even though I set the server (nginx/node.js) with the appropriate headers.
I can see in Chrome Network pane -> Response Headers:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin:http://localhost
which should do the trick.
Here's the code that I now use to test:
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.onload = function() {
console.log('xhr loaded');
};
xhr.open('GET', 'http://stackoverflow.com/');
xhr.send();
I get
XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://stackoverflow.com/. Origin http://localhost is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.
I suspect it's a problem in the client script and not server configuration...
Chrome does not support localhost for CORS requests (a bug opened in 2010, marked WontFix in 2014).
To get around this you can use a domain like localho.st (which points at 127.0.0.1 just like localhost) or start chrome with the --disable-web-security flag (assuming you're just testing).
Per #Beau's answer, Chrome does not support localhost CORS requests, and there is unlikely any change in this direction.
I use the Allow-Control-Allow-Origin: * Chrome Extension to go around this issue. The extension will add the necessary HTTP Headers for CORS:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: "GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS"
Access-Control-Expose-Headers: <you can add values here>
The source code is published on Github.
Note that the extension filter all URLs by default. This may break some websites (for example: Dropbox). I have changed it to filter only localhost URLs with the following URL filter
*://localhost:*/*
None of the extensions worked for me, so I installed a simple local proxy. In my case https://www.npmjs.com/package/local-cors-proxy
It is a 2-minute setup:
(from their site)
npm install -g local-cors-proxy
API endpoint that we want to request that has CORS issues:
https://www.yourdomain.ie/movies/list
Start Proxy: lcp --proxyUrl https://www.yourdomain.ie
Then in your client code, new API endpoint:
http://localhost:8010/proxy/movies/list
Worked like a charm for me: your app calls the proxy, who calls the server. Zero CORS problems.
The real problem is that if we set -Allow- for all request (OPTIONS & POST), Chrome will cancel it.
The following code works for me with POST to LocalHost with Chrome
<?php
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ORIGIN'])) {
//header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: {$_SERVER['HTTP_ORIGIN']}");
header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *");
header('Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true');
header("Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, OPTIONS");
}
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'OPTIONS') {
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCESS_CONTROL_REQUEST_METHOD']))
header("Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, OPTIONS");
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCESS_CONTROL_REQUEST_HEADERS']))
header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers:{$_SERVER['HTTP_ACCESS_CONTROL_REQUEST_HEADERS']}");
exit(0);
}
?>
Chrome will make requests with CORS from a localhost origin just fine. This isn't a problem with Chrome.
The reason you can't load http://stackoverflow.com is that the Access-Control-Allow-Origin headers weren't allowing your localhost origin.
Agreed! CORS should be enabled on the server-side to resolve the issue ground up. However...
For me the case was:
I desperately wanted to test my front-end(React/Angular/VUE) code locally with the REST API provided by the client with no access to the server config.
Just for testing
After trying all the steps above that didn't work I was forced to disable web security and site isolation trials on chrome along with specifying the user data directory(tried skipping this, didn't work).
For Windows
cd C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application
Disable web security and site isolation trials
chrome.exe --disable-site-isolation-trials --disable-web-security --user-data-dir="PATH_TO_PROJECT_DIRECTORY"
This finally worked! Hope this helps!
Quick and dirty Chrome extension fix:
Moesif Orign & CORS Changer
However, Chrome does support cross-origin requests from localhost. Make sure to add a header for Access-Control-Allow-Origin for localhost.
I think my solution to this might be the simplest. On my development machine, I added a fake domain in my hosts file similar to http://myfakedomain.notarealtld and set it to 127.0.0.1. Then I changed my server's CORS configuration (in my case an S3 bucket) to allow that domain. That way I can use Chrome on localhost and it works great.
Make sure your CORS configuration takes into account the entire hostname with port, ie. http://myfakedomain.notarealtld:3000
You can modify your hosts file easily on Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Chrome does allow CORS on localhost, I made it work with AWS API gateway/lambda. Viewing the network tab in the developer tools when sending http requests was very helpful. My problem was that my lambda function was not dealing with the preflight OPTIONS request, only POST and GET. I solved the issue by accepting OPTIONS requests and making sure to return the following headers from my API:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: '*' (or website domain)
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: 'POST, GET, OPTIONS'
this is the preflight response telling chrome that we can now send a POST/GET request
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: 'Content-Type'
not sure if this is necessary, but it tells chrome that the request can include a Content-Type header
The important thing to note is that the browser sends 2 sets of headers.
OPTIONS headers which includes
access-control-request-method: 'POST' (or whatever http method you are requesting)
origin: 'http://localhost:3000' (website domain)
referer: 'http://localhost:3000/' (I believe this is the full website path)
sec-fetch-mode: 'cors'
sec-fetch-site: 'cross-site'
if the response to request 1 is 200 code and the response header contains:
'access-control-allow-methods': 'POST' (or whatever the access-control-request-method was in the request),
Actual request, for example: POST headers which includes
content-type: 'application/json'
origin: same as above
referer: same as above
There are more headers but I think these were the most important.
I decided not to touch headers and make a redirect on the server side instead and it woks like a charm.
The example below is for the current version of Angular (currently 9) and probably any other framework using webpacks DevServer. But I think the same principle will work on other backends.
So I use the following configuration in the file proxy.conf.json:
{
"/api": {
"target": "http://localhost:3000",
"pathRewrite": {"^/api" : ""},
"secure": false
}
}
In case of Angular I serve with that configuration:
$ ng serve -o --proxy-config=proxy.conf.json
I prefer to use the proxy in the serve command, but you may also put this configuration to angular.json like this:
"architect": {
"serve": {
"builder": "#angular-devkit/build-angular:dev-server",
"options": {
"browserTarget": "your-application-name:build",
"proxyConfig": "src/proxy.conf.json"
},
See also:
https://www.techiediaries.com/fix-cors-with-angular-cli-proxy-configuration/
https://webpack.js.org/configuration/dev-server/#devserverproxy
The solution is to install an extension that lifts the block that Chrome does, for example:
Access Control-Allow-Origin - Unblock (https://add0n.com/access-control.html?version=0.1.5&type=install).
Apparently, I have completely misunderstood its semantics. I thought of something like this:
A client downloads JavaScript code MyCode.js from http://siteA - the origin.
The response header of MyCode.js contains Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteB, which I thought meant that MyCode.js was allowed to make cross-origin references to the site B.
The client triggers some functionality of MyCode.js, which in turn make requests to http://siteB, which should be fine, despite being cross-origin requests.
Well, I am wrong. It does not work like this at all. So, I have read Cross-origin resource sharing and attempted to read Cross-Origin Resource Sharing in w3c recommendation.
One thing is sure - I still do not understand how I am supposed to use this header.
I have full control of both site A and site B. How do I enable the JavaScript code downloaded from the site A to access resources on the site B using this header?
P.S.: I do not want to utilize JSONP.
Access-Control-Allow-Origin is a CORS (cross-origin resource sharing) header.
When Site A tries to fetch content from Site B, Site B can send an Access-Control-Allow-Origin response header to tell the browser that the content of this page is accessible to certain origins. (An origin is a domain, plus a scheme and port number.) By default, Site B's pages are not accessible to any other origin; using the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header opens a door for cross-origin access by specific requesting origins.
For each resource/page that Site B wants to make accessible to Site A, Site B should serve its pages with the response header:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteA.com
Modern browsers will not block cross-domain requests outright. If Site A requests a page from Site B, the browser will actually fetch the requested page on the network level and check if the response headers list Site A as a permitted requester domain. If Site B has not indicated that Site A is allowed to access this page, the browser will trigger the XMLHttpRequest's error event and deny the response data to the requesting JavaScript code.
Non-simple requests
What happens on the network level can be slightly more complex than explained above. If the request is a "non-simple" request, the browser first sends a data-less "preflight" OPTIONS request, to verify that the server will accept the request. A request is non-simple when either (or both):
using an HTTP verb other than GET or POST (e.g. PUT, DELETE)
using non-simple request headers; the only simple requests headers are:
Accept
Accept-Language
Content-Language
Content-Type (this is only simple when its value is application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, or text/plain)
If the server responds to the OPTIONS preflight with appropriate response headers (Access-Control-Allow-Headers for non-simple headers, Access-Control-Allow-Methods for non-simple verbs) that match the non-simple verb and/or non-simple headers, then the browser sends the actual request.
Supposing that Site A wants to send a PUT request for /somePage, with a non-simple Content-Type value of application/json, the browser would first send a preflight request:
OPTIONS /somePage HTTP/1.1
Origin: http://siteA.com
Access-Control-Request-Method: PUT
Access-Control-Request-Headers: Content-Type
Note that Access-Control-Request-Method and Access-Control-Request-Headers are added by the browser automatically; you do not need to add them. This OPTIONS preflight gets the successful response headers:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteA.com
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, PUT
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type
When sending the actual request (after preflight is done), the behavior is identical to how a simple request is handled. In other words, a non-simple request whose preflight is successful is treated the same as a simple request (i.e., the server must still send Access-Control-Allow-Origin again for the actual response).
The browsers sends the actual request:
PUT /somePage HTTP/1.1
Origin: http://siteA.com
Content-Type: application/json
{ "myRequestContent": "JSON is so great" }
And the server sends back an Access-Control-Allow-Origin, just as it would for a simple request:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteA.com
See Understanding XMLHttpRequest over CORS for a little more information about non-simple requests.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing - CORS (A.K.A. Cross-Domain AJAX request) is an issue that most web developers might encounter, according to Same-Origin-Policy, browsers restrict client JavaScript in a security sandbox, usually JS cannot directly communicate with a remote server from a different domain. In the past developers created many tricky ways to achieve Cross-Domain resource request, most commonly using ways are:
Use Flash/Silverlight or server side as a "proxy" to communicate
with remote.
JSON With Padding (JSONP).
Embeds remote server in an iframe and communicate through fragment or window.name, refer here.
Those tricky ways have more or less some issues, for example JSONP might result in security hole if developers simply "eval" it, and #3 above, although it works, both domains should build strict contract between each other, it neither flexible nor elegant IMHO:)
W3C had introduced Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) as a standard solution to provide a safe, flexible and a recommended standard way to solve this issue.
The Mechanism
From a high level we can simply deem CORS as a contract between client AJAX call from domain A and a page hosted on domain B, a typical Cross-Origin request/response would be:
DomainA AJAX request headers
Host DomainB.com
User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Accept text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8,application/json
Accept-Language en-us;
Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate
Keep-Alive 115
Origin http://DomainA.com
DomainB response headers
Cache-Control private
Content-Type application/json; charset=utf-8
Access-Control-Allow-Origin DomainA.com
Content-Length 87
Proxy-Connection Keep-Alive
Connection Keep-Alive
The blue parts I marked above were the kernal facts, "Origin" request header "indicates where the cross-origin request or preflight request originates from", the "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" response header indicates this page allows remote request from DomainA (if the value is * indicate allows remote requests from any domain).
As I mentioned above, W3 recommended browser to implement a "preflight request" before submiting the actually Cross-Origin HTTP request, in a nutshell it is an HTTP OPTIONS request:
OPTIONS DomainB.com/foo.aspx HTTP/1.1
If foo.aspx supports OPTIONS HTTP verb, it might return response like below:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2011 15:38:19 GMT
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://DomainA.com
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST, GET, OPTIONS, HEAD
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: X-Requested-With
Access-Control-Max-Age: 1728000
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: application/json
Only if the response contains "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" AND its value is "*" or contain the domain who submitted the CORS request, by satisfying this mandtory condition browser will submit the actual Cross-Domain request, and cache the result in "Preflight-Result-Cache".
I blogged about CORS three years ago: AJAX Cross-Origin HTTP request
According to this Mozilla Developer Network article,
A resource makes a cross-origin HTTP request when it requests a resource from a different domain, or port than the one which the first resource itself serves.
An HTML page served from http://domain-a.com makes an <img> src request for http://domain-b.com/image.jpg.
Many pages on the web today load resources like CSS style sheets, images and scripts from separate domains (thus it should be cool).
Same-Origin Policy
For security reasons, browsers restrict cross-origin HTTP requests initiated from within scripts.
For example, XMLHttpRequest and Fetch follow the same-origin policy.
So, a web application using XMLHttpRequest or Fetch could only make HTTP requests to its own domain.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)
To improve web applications, developers asked browser vendors to allow cross-domain requests.
The Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) mechanism gives web servers cross-domain access controls, which enable secure cross-domain data transfers.
Modern browsers use CORS in an API container - such as XMLHttpRequest or fetch - to mitigate risks of cross-origin HTTP requests.
How CORS works (Access-Control-Allow-Origin header)
Wikipedia:
The CORS standard describes new HTTP headers which provide browsers and servers a way to request remote URLs only when they have permission.
Although some validation and authorization can be performed by the server, it is generally the browser's responsibility to support these headers and honor the restrictions they impose.
Example
The browser sends the OPTIONS request with an Origin HTTP header.
The value of this header is the domain that served the parent page. When a page from http://www.example.com attempts to access a user's data in service.example.com, the following request header would be sent to service.example.com:
Origin: http://www.example.com
The server at service.example.com may respond with:
An Access-Control-Allow-Origin (ACAO) header in its response indicating which origin sites are allowed.
For example:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://www.example.com
An error page if the server does not allow the cross-origin request
An Access-Control-Allow-Origin (ACAO) header with a wildcard that allows all domains:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Whenever I start thinking about CORS, my intuition about which site hosts the headers is incorrect, just as you described in your question. For me, it helps to think about the purpose of the same-origin policy.
The purpose of the same-origin policy is to protect you from malicious JavaScript on siteA.com accessing private information you've chosen to share only with siteB.com. Without the same-origin policy, JavaScript written by the authors of siteA.com could have your browser make requests to siteB.com, using your authentication cookies for siteB.com. In this way, siteA.com could steal the secret information you share with siteB.com.
Sometimes you need to work cross domain, which is where CORS comes in. CORS relaxes the same-origin policy for siteB.com, using the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to list other domains (siteA.com) that are trusted to run JavaScript that can interact with siteB.com.
To understand which domain should serve the CORS headers, consider this. You visit malicious.com, which contains some JavaScript that tries to make a cross domain request to mybank.com. It should be up to mybank.com, not malicious.com, to decide whether or not it sets CORS headers that relax the same-origin policy, allowing the JavaScript from malicious.com to interact with it. If malicous.com could set its own CORS headers allowing its own JavaScript access to mybank.com, this would completely nullify the same-origin policy.
I think the reason for my bad intuition is the point of view I have when developing a site. It's my site, with all my JavaScript. Therefore, it isn't doing anything malicious, and it should be up to me to specify which other sites my JavaScript can interact with. When in fact I should be thinking: Which other sites' JavaScript are trying to interact with my site and should I use CORS to allow them?
From my own experience, it's hard to find a simple explanation why CORS is even a concern.
Once you understand why it's there, the headers and discussion becomes a lot clearer. I'll give it a shot in a few lines.
It's all about cookies. Cookies are stored on a client by their domain.
An example story: On your computer, there's a cookie for yourbank.com. Maybe your session is in there.
Key point: When a client makes a request to the server, it will send the cookies stored under the domain for that request.
You're logged in on your browser to yourbank.com. You request to see all your accounts, and cookies are sent for yourbank.com. yourbank.com receives the pile of cookies and sends back its response (your accounts).
If another client makes a cross origin request to a server, those cookies are sent along, just as before. Ruh roh.
You browse to malicious.com. Malicious makes a bunch of requests to different banks, including yourbank.com.
Since the cookies are validated as expected, the server will authorize the response.
Those cookies get gathered up and sent along - and now, malicious.com has a response from yourbank.
Yikes.
So now, a few questions and answers become apparent:
"Why don't we just block the browser from doing that?" Yep. That's CORS.
"How do we get around it?" Have the server tell the request that CORS is OK.
1. A client downloads javascript code MyCode.js from http://siteA - the origin.
The code that does the downloading - your html script tag or xhr from javascript or whatever - came from, let's say, http://siteZ. And, when the browser requests MyCode.js, it sends an Origin: header saying "Origin: http://siteZ", because it can see that you're requesting to siteA and siteZ != siteA. (You cannot stop or interfere with this.)
2. The response header of MyCode.js contains Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://siteB, which I thought meant that MyCode.js was allowed to make cross-origin references to the site B.
no. It means, Only siteB is allowed to do this request. So your request for MyCode.js from siteZ gets an error instead, and the browser typically gives you nothing. But if you make your server return A-C-A-O: siteZ instead, you'll get MyCode.js . Or if it sends '*', that'll work, that'll let everybody in. Or if the server always sends the string from the Origin: header... but... for security, if you're afraid of hackers, your server should only allow origins on a shortlist, that are allowed to make those requests.
Then, MyCode.js comes from siteA. When it makes requests to siteB, they are all cross-origin, the browser sends Origin: siteA, and siteB has to take the siteA, recognize it's on the short list of allowed requesters, and send back A-C-A-O: siteA. Only then will the browser let your script get the result of those requests.
Using React and Axios, join a proxy link to the URL and add a header as shown below:
https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/ + Your API URL
Just adding the proxy link will work, but it can also throw an error for No Access again. Hence it is better to add a header as shown below.
axios.get(`https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/[YOUR_API_URL]`,{headers: {'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*'}})
.then(response => console.log(response:data);
}
Warning: Not to be used in production
This is just a quick fix. If you're struggling with why you're not able to get a response, you can use this.
But again it's not the best answer for production.
If you are using PHP, try adding the following code at the beginning of the php file:
If you are using localhost, try this:
header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *");
If you are using external domains such as server, try this:
header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://www.website.com");
I worked with Express.js 4, Node.js 7.4 and Angular, and I had the same problem. This helped me:
a) server side: in file app.js I add headers to all responses, like:
app.use(function(req, res, next) {
res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', req.headers.origin);
res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Accept");
next();
});
This must be before all routes.
I saw a lot of added this headers:
res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers","*");
res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Credentials', true);
res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods', 'GET,PUT,POST,DELETE');
But I don’t need that,
b) client side: in sending by Ajax, you need to add "withCredentials: true," like:
$http({
method: 'POST',
url: 'url',
withCredentials: true,
data : {}
}).then(function(response){
// Code
}, function (response) {
// Code
});
If you want just to test a cross-domain application in which the browser blocks your request, then you can just open your browser in unsafe mode and test your application without changing your code and without making your code unsafe.
From macOS, you can do this from the terminal line:
open -a Google\ Chrome --args --disable-web-security --user-data-dir
In Python, I have been using the Flask-CORS library with great success. It makes dealing with CORS super easy and painless. I added some code from the library's documentation below.
Installing:
pip install -U flask-cors
Simple example that allows CORS for all domains on all routes:
from flask import Flask
from flask_cors import CORS
app = Flask(__name__)
CORS(app)
#app.route("/")
def helloWorld():
return "Hello, cross-origin-world!"
For more specific examples, see the documentation. I have used the simple example above to get around the CORS issue in an Ionic application I am building that has to access a separate flask server.
Simply paste the following code in your web.config file.
Noted that, you have to paste the following code under <system.webServer> tag
<httpProtocol>
<customHeaders>
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Origin" value="*" />
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Headers" value="Content-Type" />
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Methods" value="GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS" />
</customHeaders>
</httpProtocol>
I can't configure it on the back-end server, but with these extensions in the browsers, it works for me:
For Firefox:
CORS Everywhere
For Google Chrome:
Allow CORS: Access-Control-Allow-Origin
Note: CORS works for me with this configuration:
For cross origin sharing, set header: 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin':'*';
Php: header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin':'*');
Node: app.use('Access-Control-Allow-Origin':'*');
This will allow to share content for different domain.
Nginx and Apache
As an addition to apsiller's answer, I would like to add a wiki graph which shows when a request is simple or not (and OPTIONS pre-flight request is send or not)
For a simple request (e.g., hotlinking images), you don't need to change your server configuration files, but you can add headers in the application (hosted on the server, e.g., in PHP) like Melvin Guerrero mentions in his answer - but remember: if you add full CORS headers in your server (configuration) and at same time you allow simple CORS in the application (e.g., PHP), this will not work at all.
And here are configurations for two popular servers:
turn on CORS on Nginx (nginx.conf file)
location ~ ^/index\.php(/|$) {
...
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' "$http_origin" always; # if you change "$http_origin" to "*" you shoud get same result - allow all domain to CORS (but better change it to your particular domain)
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true' always;
if ($request_method = OPTIONS) {
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' "$http_origin"; # DO NOT remove THIS LINES (doubled with outside 'if' above)
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';
add_header 'Access-Control-Max-Age' 1728000; # cache preflight value for 20 days
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET, POST, OPTIONS'; # arbitrary methods
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'My-First-Header,My-Second-Header,Authorization,Content-Type,Accept,Origin'; # arbitrary headers
add_header 'Content-Length' 0;
add_header 'Content-Type' 'text/plain charset=UTF-8';
return 204;
}
}
turn on CORS on Apache (.htaccess file)
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# | Cross-domain Ajax requests |
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Enable cross-origin Ajax requests.
# http://code.google.com/p/html5security/wiki/CrossOriginRequestSecurity
# http://enable-cors.org/
# change * (allow any domain) below to your domain
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Methods "POST, GET, OPTIONS, DELETE, PUT"
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Headers "My-First-Header,My-Second-Header,Authorization, content-type, csrf-token"
Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Credentials "true"
The Access-Control-Allow-Origin response header indicates whether the
response can be shared with requesting code from the given origin.
Header type Response header
-------------------------------------------
Forbidden header name no
A response that tells the browser to allow code from any origin to
access a resource will include the following:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
For more information, visit Access-Control-Allow-Origin...
For .NET Core 3.1 API With Angular
Startup.cs : Add CORS
//SERVICES
public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services){
//CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing)
//=====================================
services.AddCors();
}
//MIDDLEWARES
public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IWebHostEnvironment env)
{
app.UseRouting();
//ORDER: CORS -> Authentication -> Authorization)
//CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing)
//=====================================
app.UseCors(x=>x.AllowAnyHeader().AllowAnyMethod().WithOrigins("http://localhost:4200"));
app.UseHttpsRedirection();
}
}
Controller : Enable CORS For Authorized Controller
//Authorize all methods inside this controller
[Authorize]
[EnableCors()]
public class UsersController : ControllerBase
{
//ActionMethods
}
Note: Only a temporary solution for testing
For those who can't control the backend for Options 405 Method Not Allowed, here is a workaround for theChrome browser.
Execute in the command line:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disable-web-security --user-data-dir="path_to_profile"
Example:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disable-web-security --user-data-dir="C:\Users\vital\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Profile 2"
Most CORS issues are because you are trying to request via client side ajax from a react, angular, jquery apps that are frontend basic libs.
You must request from a backend application.
You are trying to request from a frontend API, but the API you are trying to consume is expecting this request to be made from a backend application and it will never accept client side requests.