How CORS (cross-origin resource sharing) works
If you are a web developer, you must have seen the CORS error appear on your screen when you try to call the API, but why does that happen?
Well, for security reasons, browsers restrict cross-origin HTTP requests initiated from scripts. For example, if you want to access your API hosted at https://api.github.com from your client-side frontend application that is hosted at https://example.com, the browser will not allow this request to complete.
You only need to think about CORS when:
- API accessed by the browser.
- API is hosted on a separate domain.
So, why does this happen?
The browsers enforce a security feature called Same Origin Policy. According to Same Origin Policy, the Same Origin calls are allowed and Different Origin calls are not allowed.
Uhh!! What is this Same Origin, Different Origin? Let’s see this in more detail. Browsers define the Origin as a combination of Scheme, Host, and Port.
Scheme name- It is the protocol to be used to access the resource on the Internet. The scheme names are followed by the three characters
://.The most commonly used protocols arehttp://,https://,ftp://, andmailto://.Hostname - It is the address of the host where the resource is located. A hostname is a domain name assigned to a host computer. This is usually a combination of the host’s local name with its parent domain’s name. For example, www.dev.to consists of the host’s machine name www and the domain name dev.to
Port Number - Port is a communication endpoint where your application is run. For more information about Port Number, check out this link.
If these three combinations of Scheme, Hostname, and Port are the same, then the browser identifies it as the Same Origin and the request gets completed.
Does this mean that it is impossible to make the
Cross-Origin HTTP request??
The answer is NO; that’s where the CORS comes into the picture.
How CORS works
CORS allows the server to explicitly whitelist certain origin and help to bypass the same-origin policy.
If your server is configured for CORS, it will return an extra header with “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” on each response.
For example, if my API server hosted at https://api.dipakkr.com/users is CORS configured, and I am making a request from my client application https://github.com to fetch some data, then the response will have this header.
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://educative.io
CORS preflight request
Preflighted requests first send an HTTP request by the OPTIONS method to the resource on the other domain to determine if the actual request is safe to send or not.
You can read more about CORS Preflight request at MDN.
How to Enable CORS
To enable CORS on your server application, you need two things:
- First, you need to determine the origins of whitelist.
- Second, you have to add the CORS middleware to the server.
Below, I will explain the steps of how to configure CORS on your NODEJS server.
First, install the cors npm package from this link.
npm install cors
Then, go to your server application and add the below code.
// require the cors packagevar cors = require('cors');// enables corsapp.use(cors({origin: "*",methods: "GET,HEAD,PUT,PATCH,POST,DELETE",preflightContinue: false}));
Here you can see I am using origin: "*" which means any domain can access this application.
Please note that it is dangerous to put
origin:"*"in a production application (you should never do that). Instead, specify the domains you want to whitelist.
To know more about CORS, please visit MDN. It’s a great place for web developers.
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