Preflight request is sent with all methods - javascript

My FE application is using API from different domain. I know that it should trigger CORS, but as I understood it shouldn't create preflight for every request.
According to docs, I shouldn't have preflight request for GET method.
Cross-site requests are preflighted like this since they may have implications to
user data. In particular, a request is preflighted if:
- It uses methods other than GET, HEAD or POST.
Also, if POST is used to send request data with a Content-Type
other than application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data,
or text/plain, e.g. if the POST request sends an XML payload to the
server using application/xml or text/xml, then the request is preflighted.
- It sets custom headers in the request
(e.g. the request uses a header such as X-PINGOTHER)
However, every request that I'm sending, has preflight (OPTIONS) request, no matter if it's GET or POST, and I find it strange (according to what docs said).
I set some headers (and I'm sending it with withCredentials: true), but I don't see that it should be the issue:
headers.append('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', FRONTEND_URL);
headers.append('Accept', 'application/json');
headers.append('Content-Type', 'application/json');
headers.append('Authorization', this._generateApiKey());
headers.append('Language', this._languageISOCode);
Am I missing something?

See https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/HTTP/Access_control_CORS#Simple_requests
A CORS preflight OPTIONS request can be triggered just by adding a Content-Type header to a request — if the value’s anything except application/x-www-form-urlencoded, text/plain, or multipart/form-data. And that’s true even for GET requests (though you should never add a Content-Type header to a GET — because there’s no request body, so it serves no purpose).
And among the headers shown in the question, the Authorization header will also trigger a preflight, as will the "Language" header (which isn’t even a standard header name; maybe Accept-Language was intended?), and the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header (which isn’t even a request header; it’s a response header that should never be used in frontend code).
As far as the headers that don’t trigger a preflight: the Fetch spec (which defines CORS behavior) specifies what it calls a CORS-safelisted request-header, and defines as one of:
Accept
Accept-Language
Content-Language
Content-Type whose value, once parsed, has a MIME type (ignoring parameters) that is application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, or text/plain
Any request — including any GET request — which contains a header that’s not among those CORS-safelisted request-headers listed above will trigger a preflight.
To help make all that more clear, I updated the MDN docs about CORS “simple requests” and the MDN docs about CORS preflighted requests (it’s slightly more complicated than what’s described above, actually—but what’s above suffices for the context of this question).
Note that WebKit/Safari places additional restrictions on the values allowed in the Accept, Accept-Language, and Content-Language headers.
If any of those headers have ”non-standard” values, WebKit/Safari will do a preflight.
As far as what WebKit/Safari considers “non-standard” values for those headers, that’s not really documented except in the following WebKit bugs:
Require preflight for non-standard CORS-safelisted request headers Accept, Accept-Language, and Content-Language
Allow commas in Accept, Accept-Language, and Content-Language request headers for simple CORS
Switch to a blacklist model for restricted Accept headers in simple CORS requests
No other browsers impose those extra restrictions, because they’re not part of the spec. They were unilaterally added to WebKit with no discussion with the spec editor or other browsers.

The cross-domain issue typically occurs when the application is hosted on one domain, the web service is hosted on a different domain and we are trying to make an Ajax call to get the response.
An Ajax call to our web services ended with a CORS error.The HTTP method that was invoked was OPTIONS and not GET or POST.
Resolving this issue was one aspect but we still needed to retain the security authentication. Otherwise, we would end up exposing an unauthenticated web service which is a threat.
if (request.getMethod().equals("OPTIONS") && request.getHeader(ORIGIN).equals(FRONTEND_URL))
{
response.setHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", FRONTEND_URL);
response.setHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Credentials", "true");
response.setHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD");
response.setHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Headers",request.getHeader("Access-Control-Request-Headers"));
}

Related

Fetch API: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' error even after adding "Access-Control-Allow-Origin": "*" to my headers [duplicate]

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.

HTTP request from Angular sent as OPTIONS instead of POST

I'm trying to send some HTTP requests from my angular.js application to my server, but I need to solve some CORS errors.
The HTTP request is made using the following code:
functions.test = function(foo, bar) {
return $http({
method: 'POST',
url: api_endpoint + 'test',
headers: {
'foo': 'value',
'content-type': 'application/json'
},
data: {
bar:'value'
}
});
};
The first try ended up with some CORS errors. So I've added the following lines to my PHP script:
header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *');
header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST, GET, OPTIONS, DELETE, PUT');
header('Access-Control-Allow-Headers: X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Origin, Authorization, Accept, Client-Security-Token, Accept-Encoding, X-Auth-Token, content-type');
The first error is now eliminated.
Now the Chrome's developer console shows me the following errors:
angular.js:12011 OPTIONS http://localhost:8000/test (anonymous
function)
423ef03a:1 XMLHttpRequest cannot load
http://localhost:8000/test. Response for preflight has invalid HTTP
status code 400
and the network request looks like I expected (HTTP status 400 is also expected):
I can't imagine how to solve the thing (and how to understand) why the request will send on localhost as OPTIONS and to remote servers as POST. Is there a solution how to fix this strange issue?
TL;DR answer
Explanation
The OPTIONS request is so called pre-flight request, which is part of Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS). Browsers use it to check if a request is allowed from a particular domain as follows:
The browser wants to send a request to a particular URL, let's say a POST request with the application/json content type
First, it sends the pre-flight OPTIONS request to the same URL
What follows depends on the pre-flight request's response HTTP status code:
If the server replies with a non-2XX status response, the browser won't send the actual request (because he knows now that it would be refused anyway)
If the server replies with a HTTP 200 OK (or any other 2XX) response, the browser will send the actual request, POST in your case
Solution
So, in your case, the proper header is present, you just have to make sure the pre-flight request's response HTTP status code is 200 OK or some other successful one (2XX).
Detailed Explanation
Simple requests
Browsers are not sending the pre-flight requests in some cases, those are so-called simple requests and are used in the following conditions:
One of the allowed methods:
- GET
- HEAD
- POST
Apart from the headers automatically set by the user agent (for example, Connection, User-Agent, etc.), the only headers which are allowed to be manually set are the following:
Accept
Accept-Language
Content-Language
Content-Type (but note the additional requirements below)
DPR
Downlink
Save-Data
Viewport-Width
Width
The only allowed values for the Content-Type header are:
application/x-www-form-urlencoded
multipart/form-data
text/plain
No event listeners are registered on any XMLHttpRequestUpload object used in the request; these are accessed using the XMLHttpRequest.upload property.
No ReadableStream object is used in the request.
Such requests are sent directly and the server simply successfully processes the request or replies with an error in case it didn't match the CORS rules. In any case, the response will contain the CORS headers Access-Control-Allow-*.
Pre-flighted requests
Browsers are sending the pre-flight requests if the actual request doesn't meet the simple request conditions, the most usually:
custom content types like application/xml or application/json, etc., are used
the request method is other than GET, HEAD or POST
the POST method is of an another content type than application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data or text/plain
You need to make sure that the response to the pre-flight request has the following attributes:
successful HTTP status code, i.e. 200 OK
header Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * (a wildcard * allows a request from any domain, you can use any specific domain to restrict the access here of course)
From the other side, the server may refuse the CORS request simply by sending a response to the pre-flight request with the following attributes:
non-success HTTP code (i.e. other than 2XX)
success HTTP code (e.g. 200 OK), but without any CORS header (i.e. Access-Control-Allow-*)
See the documentation on Mozilla Developer Network or for example HTML5Rocks' CORS tutorial for details.
I ran into a very similar problem writing an Angular 2 app - that uses a NODE server for the API.
Since I am developing on my local machine, I kept getting Cross Origin Header problems, when I would try to POST to the API from my Angular app.
Setting the Headers (in the node server) as below worked for GET requests, but my PUT requests kept posting empty objects to the database.
header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *');
header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST, GET, OPTIONS, DELETE, PUT');
header('Access-Control-Allow-Headers: X-Requested-With, Content-Type,
Origin, Authorization, Accept, Client-Security-Token, Accept-
Encoding, X-Auth-Token, content-type');
After reading Dawid Ferenczy's post, I realized that the PREFLIGHT request was sending blank data to my server, and that's why my DB entries were empty, so I added this line in the NODE JS server:
if (req.method == "OPTIONS")
{
res.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type": "application/json"});
res.end();
}
So now my server ignores the PREFLIGHT request, (and returns status 200, to let the browser know everything is groovy...) and that way, the real request can go through and I get real data posted to my DB!
Just put
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'OPTIONS') {
header("HTTP/1.1 200 ");
exit;}
at the beginning of your serverside app and you should be fine.
For spring boot application, to enable cors request, use #CrossOrigin(origins = "*", maxAge = 3600) on your respective controller.
Refer this doc
The best is to :
have proxy.conf.json set:
{
"/api": {
"target": "http://localhost:8080",
"secure": false,
"logLevel": "debug",
"changeOrigin": true
}
}
And then to make sure that URL that you are using in angular to send a request is relative (/api/something) and not absolute (localhost:8080/api/something). Because in that case the proxy won't work.
From Chrome v79+, OPTIONS Check(pre-flight request) will no longer appear in the network tab-Source

CORS access blocking

I might need some help here.
I was trying to establish a connection with XMLHttpRequest from JavaScript to a PHP Script on another origin.
First thing I noticed was that I got a error from this request which told me that there were header missing. I searched a bit and found this documentation. I modified the header like this:
JS
//this.mozSystem = true;
this.open("POST", url, true);
this.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/json");
this.setRequestHeader("ADDON-TO-SERVER", "");
this.setRequestHeader("Content-length", massage.length);
this.setRequestHeader("Connection", "close");
PHP
header("Content-type: application/json");
header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *");
header("Access-Control-Request-Method: POST");
header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers: ADDON-TO-SERVER,Content-type");
And it works ... but I am not sure why in
header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers: ADDON-TO-SERVER,Content-type");
Content-type is needed.
Mozilla told me to add this one, but I though that it would just need one custom header, and isn't Content-type a basic one ?
Could someone tell me why this is needed and tell me if I done everything like it is intended to.
Thanks for any help,
Feirell
As far as headers go in the context of CORS, a Content-type request header with the value of application/json is not considered a “basic one” (to borrow your wording).
In the context of CORS, a Content-type request header is only considered “basic” if its value is application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, or text/plain.
So your browser will allow a Content-type: application/json request from your Web application to work as expected only if the server you are sending that request to explicitly indicates that it’s OK with receiving such requests. And the way a server does that is by responding with a Access-Control-Allow-Headersheader that contains Content-type.
The rationale for your browser enforcing that restriction is that unless a server explicitly indicates is it OK with certain kinds of cross-origin requests, CORS is not intended to allow Web applications to do any kind of programmatic cross-origin requests that do anything more than what a basic HTML form-element action have always been able to do cross-origin.
And so since before CORS came along, HTML page have always been restricted just to sending application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, or text/plain requests cross-origin, that’s what the basic CORS behavior is restricted to unless the server opts-in for more.

Why is request preflighted if I add a standard http header when using cors?

I need to add some common extra info (needs to be sent with most of our http requests) to cross domain http requests, the extra data is something like device info or location info. We are using custom http headers for these info currently, but the custom header will make the browser to send an preflight request before the real http request, so we want to remove the preflight request for performance considerations. We considered using cookie firstly, but since the request is cross-domain, we can't set cookie for the domain of our API with javascript. Then I searched for documents, According to Mozilla docs:
In particular, a request is preflighted if:
It uses methods other than GET, HEAD or POST. Also, if POST is used
to send request data with a Content-Type other than
application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, or text/plain,
e.g. if the POST request sends an XML payload to the server using
application/xml or text/xml, then the request is preflighted.
It sets custom headers in the request (e.g. the request uses a header
such as X-PINGOTHER)
So I thought if I use a standard http header which is seldom used: the "From" header, it will not trigger the options request. but after I test this, I found I was wrong, the "From" header still trigger the options request.
So I have two questions:
Why does a standard http header trigger the preflight request?
How should I send the extra info without trigger the preflight request?
Any helps will be appreciated.
Read the above portion of the same page on what constitutes a "simple request" that doesn't need to be preflighted:
Apart from the headers set automatically by the user-agent (e.g. Connection, User-Agent, etc.), the only headers which are allowed to be set manually are
Accept
Accept-Language
Content-Language
Content-Type
"custom headers" doesn't mean "nonstandard headers", it means any header not automatically set by the browser, other than those four.

CORS with pysimplesoap server

I am using pysimplesoap APIs to support a SOAP server with the following code :
httpd = BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer(("", 8008), SOAPHandler)
httpd.dispatcher = dispatcher
httpd.serve_forever()
This works well, but not if requests are generated using JS/XMLHttpRequest (CORS issue), as the default implementation of SOAPHandler does not support the OPTIONS method. I added this :
class MySOAPHandler(SOAPHandler):
def do_OPTIONS(self):
self.send_response(200)
self.send_header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', '*')
self.send_header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods', 'GET, POST, OPTIONS')
self.send_header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "X-Requested-With")
self.end_headers()
But the code still does not support CORS requests and the HTTP status is 0?
CORS is a particularly stubborn standard. Your static response for Options will not work for anything but the "basic" requests. You need to make a few changes:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin may not be wildcard. It has to be a specific domain. Just look at the request header and echo back the Origin field.
Access-Control-Allow-Headers should also be dynamic since clients/JS tend to throw wacky stuff in there. Echo back the Access-Control-Request-Headers field.
Also add in a Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true header.
For debugging, to keep yourself sane, put in a Access-Control-Max-Age: 1 header. Without this header the browser will cache the results of the OPTIONS request for a long time. This is fine for production deployment but for testing it just gets annoying.

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