I am building a web API. I found whenever I use Chrome to POST, GET to my API, there is always an OPTIONS request sent before the real request, which is quite annoying. Currently, I get the server to ignore any OPTIONS requests. Now my question is what's good to send an OPTIONS request to double the server's load? Is there any way to completely stop the browser from sending OPTIONS requests?
edit 2018-09-13: added some precisions about this pre-flight request and how to avoid it at the end of this reponse.
OPTIONS requests are what we call pre-flight requests in Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).
They are necessary when you're making requests across different origins in specific situations.
This pre-flight request is made by some browsers as a safety measure to ensure that the request being done is trusted by the server.
Meaning the server understands that the method, origin and headers being sent on the request are safe to act upon.
Your server should not ignore but handle these requests whenever you're attempting to do cross origin requests.
A good resource can be found here http://enable-cors.org/
A way to handle these to get comfortable is to ensure that for any path with OPTIONS method the server sends a response with this header
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
This will tell the browser that the server is willing to answer requests from any origin.
For more information on how to add CORS support to your server see the following flowchart
http://www.html5rocks.com/static/images/cors_server_flowchart.png
edit 2018-09-13
CORS OPTIONS request is triggered only in somes cases, as explained in MDN docs:
Some requests don’t trigger a CORS preflight. Those are called “simple requests” in this article, though the Fetch spec (which defines CORS) doesn’t use that term. A request that doesn’t trigger a CORS preflight—a so-called “simple request”—is one that meets all the following conditions:
The only allowed methods are:
GET
HEAD
POST
Apart from the headers set automatically by the user agent (for example, Connection, User-Agent, or any of the other headers with names defined in the Fetch spec as a “forbidden header name”), the only headers which are allowed to be manually set are those which the Fetch spec defines as being a “CORS-safelisted request-header”, which are:
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.
Have gone through this issue, below is my conclusion to this issue and my solution.
According to the CORS strategy (highly recommend you read about it) You can't just force the browser to stop sending OPTIONS request if it thinks it needs to.
There are two ways you can work around it:
Make sure your request is a "simple request"
Set Access-Control-Max-Age for the OPTIONS request
Simple request
A simple cross-site request is one that meets all the following conditions:
The only allowed methods are:
GET
HEAD
POST
Apart from the headers set automatically by the user agent (e.g. Connection, User-Agent, etc.), the only headers which are allowed to be manually set are:
Accept
Accept-Language
Content-Language
Content-Type
The only allowed values for the Content-Type header are:
application/x-www-form-urlencoded
multipart/form-data
text/plain
A simple request will not cause a pre-flight OPTIONS request.
Set a cache for the OPTIONS check
You can set a Access-Control-Max-Age for the OPTIONS request, so that it will not check the permission again until it is expired.
Access-Control-Max-Age gives the value in seconds for how long the response to the preflight request can be cached for without sending another preflight request.
Limitation Noted
For Chrome, the maximum seconds for Access-Control-Max-Age is 600 which is 10 minutes, according to chrome source code
Access-Control-Max-Age only works for one resource every time, for example, GET requests with same URL path but different queries will be treated as different resources. So the request to the second resource will still trigger a preflight request.
Please refer this answer on the actual need for pre-flighted OPTIONS request: CORS - What is the motivation behind introducing preflight requests?
To disable the OPTIONS request, below conditions must be satisfied for ajax request:
Request does not set custom HTTP headers like 'application/xml' or 'application/json' etc
The request method has to be one of GET, HEAD or POST. If POST, content type should be one of application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, or text/plain
Reference:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Access_control_CORS
When you have the debug console open and the Disable Cache option turned on, preflight requests will always be sent (i.e. before each and every request). if you don't disable the cache, a pre-flight request will be sent only once (per server)
Yes it's possible to avoid options request. Options request is a preflight request when you send (post) any data to another domain. It's a browser security issue. But we can use another technology: iframe transport layer. I strongly recommend you forget about any CORS configuration and use readymade solution and it will work anywhere.
Take a look here:
https://github.com/jpillora/xdomain
And working example:
http://jpillora.com/xdomain/
For a developer who understands the reason it exists but needs to access an API that doesn't handle OPTIONS calls without auth, I need a temporary answer so I can develop locally until the API owner adds proper SPA CORS support or I get a proxy API up and running.
I found you can disable CORS in Safari and Chrome on a Mac.
Disable same origin policy in Chrome
Chrome: Quit Chrome, open an terminal and paste this command: open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app --args --disable-web-security --user-data-dir
Safari: Disabling same-origin policy in Safari
If you want to disable the same-origin policy on Safari (I have 9.1.1), then you only need to enable the developer menu, and select "Disable Cross-Origin Restrictions" from the develop menu.
As mentioned in previous posts already, OPTIONS requests are there for a reason. If you have an issue with large response times from your server (e.g. overseas connection) you can also have your browser cache the preflight requests.
Have your server reply with the Access-Control-Max-Age header and for requests that go to the same endpoint the preflight request will have been cached and not occur anymore.
I have solved this problem like.
if($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'OPTIONS' && ENV == 'devel') {
header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *');
header('Access-Control-Allow-Headers: X-Requested-With');
header("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");
die();
}
It is only for development. With this I am waiting 9ms and 500ms and not 8s and 500ms. I can do that because production JS app will be on the same machine as production so there will be no OPTIONS but development is my local.
You can't but you could avoid CORS using JSONP.
After spending a whole day and a half trying to work through a similar problem I found it had to do with IIS.
My Web API project was set up as follows:
// WebApiConfig.cs
public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config)
{
var cors = new EnableCorsAttribute("*", "*", "*");
config.EnableCors(cors);
//...
}
I did not have CORS specific config options in the web.config > system.webServer node like I have seen in so many posts
No CORS specific code in the global.asax or in the controller as a decorator
The problem was the app pool settings.
The managed pipeline mode was set to classic (changed it to integrated) and the Identity was set to Network Service (changed it to ApplicationPoolIdentity)
Changing those settings (and refreshing the app pool) fixed it for me.
OPTIONS request is a feature of web browsers, so it's not easy to disable it. But I found a way to redirect it away with proxy. It's useful in case that the service endpoint just cannot handle CORS/OPTIONS yet, maybe still under development, or mal-configured.
Steps:
Setup a reverse proxy for such requests with tools of choice (nginx, YARP, ...)
Create an endpoint just to handle the OPTIONS request. It might be easier to create a normal empty endpoint, and make sure it handles CORS well.
Configure two sets of rules for the proxy. One is to route all OPTIONS requests to the dummy endpoint above. Another to route all other requests to actual endpoint in question.
Update the web site to use proxy instead.
Basically this approach is to cheat browser that OPTIONS request works. Considering CORS is not to enhance security, but to relax the same-origin policy, I hope this trick could work for a while. :)
you can also use a API Manager (like Open Sources Gravitee.io) to prevent CORS issues between frontend app and backend services by manipulating headers in preflight.
Header used in response to a preflight request to indicate which HTTP headers can be used when making the actual request :
content-type
access-control-allow-header
authorization
x-requested-with
and specify the "allow-origin" = localhost:4200 for example
One solution I have used in the past - lets say your site is on mydomain.com, and you need to make an ajax request to foreigndomain.com
Configure an IIS rewrite from your domain to the foreign domain - e.g.
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="ForeignRewrite" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^api/v1/(.*)$" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="https://foreigndomain.com/{R:1}" />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
on your mydomain.com site - you can then make a same origin request, and there's no need for any options request :)
It can be solved in case of use of a proxy that intercept the request and write the appropriate headers.
In the particular case of Varnish these would be the rules:
if (req.http.host == "CUSTOM_URL" ) {
set resp.http.Access-Control-Allow-Origin = "*";
if (req.method == "OPTIONS") {
set resp.http.Access-Control-Max-Age = "1728000";
set resp.http.Access-Control-Allow-Methods = "GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH, OPTIONS";
set resp.http.Access-Control-Allow-Headers = "Authorization,Content-Type,Accept,Origin,User-Agent,DNT,Cache-Control,X-Mx-ReqToken,Keep-Alive,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since";
set resp.http.Content-Length = "0";
set resp.http.Content-Type = "text/plain charset=UTF-8";
set resp.status = 204;
}
}
What worked for me was to import "github.com/gorilla/handlers" and then use it this way:
router := mux.NewRouter()
router.HandleFunc("/config", getConfig).Methods("GET")
router.HandleFunc("/config/emcServer", createEmcServers).Methods("POST")
headersOk := handlers.AllowedHeaders([]string{"X-Requested-With", "Content-Type"})
originsOk := handlers.AllowedOrigins([]string{"*"})
methodsOk := handlers.AllowedMethods([]string{"GET", "HEAD", "POST", "PUT", "OPTIONS"})
log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":" + webServicePort, handlers.CORS(originsOk, headersOk, methodsOk)(router)))
As soon as I executed an Ajax POST request and attaching JSON data to it, Chrome would always add the Content-Type header which was not in my previous AllowedHeaders config.
I'm a n00b trying to learn React. I'm building a website that uses Etsy's APIs. Registered an app there and everything. They have a page that talks about CORS and proxying here: https://www.etsy.com/developers/documentation/getting_started/jsonp
So for example, I'm trying to do a fetch on a store's listings:
fetch('https://openapi.etsy.com/v2/shops/[shopId]/listings/active?api_key=[apiKey]')
But that violates the browser's CORS policy. No problem, says the documentation on Etsy. You can always use their proxy: beta-api.etsy.com. So I add that to my package.json file:
"proxy": "https://beta-api.etsy.com/"
And then I change my fetch line:
fetch('/v2/shops/[shopId]/listings/active?api_key=[apiKey]')
But CORS is still being violated in the browser.
Access to fetch at 'https://www.etsy.com/shop/beta-api/v2/shops/[shopId]/listings/active?api_key=[apiKey]' (redirected from 'http://localhost:3000/v2/shops/[shopId]/listings/active?api_key=[apiKey]') from origin 'http://localhost:3000' has been blocked by CORS policy: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. If an opaque response serves your needs, set the request's mode to 'no-cors' to fetch the resource with CORS disabled.
I don't want an opaque response, either, so doing "no-cors" really doesn't help. Does anyone have any recommendations on how I can at least get a local website up and running?
You are getting that error because your server has set Access-Control-Allow-Origin to restrict cross-domain traffic. You are sending your request from your localhost so that is considered cross-domain.
If you are able to change your server settings to set Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * then you can make those requests without a CORS error but I don't suggest doing this.
The best solution would probably be a proxy server. You can use cors-anywhere heroku app to easily do this.
Excerpt from Medium Article on this issue
The cors-anywhere server is a proxy that adds CORS headers to a
request. A proxy acts as an intermediary between a client and server.
In this case, the cors-anywhere proxy server operates in between the
frontend web app making the request, and the server that responds with
data.
Similar to the Allow-control-allow-origin plugin, it adds the
more open Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header to the response.
Say your frontend is trying to make a GET request to:
https://joke-api-strict-cors.appspot.com/jokes/random
But this api does not have a Access-Control-Allow-Origin value
in place that permits the web application domain to access it.
So instead, send your GET request to:
https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/https://joke-api-strict-cors.appspot.com/jokes/random
The proxy server receives the
https://joke-api-strict-cors.appspot.com/jokes/random
from the url above. Then it makes the request to get that server’s
response. And finally, the proxy applies the Access-Control-Allow-
Origin: * to that original response.
I have react app what I already deployed to the GitHub Pages.
But now I have a problem: what I am requesting auth status to server and didn`t get any response. What is the problem?
I have this error in console about my requests
has been blocked by CORS policy:
Response to preflight request doesn't pass access control check:
No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource
GitHub pages supports CORS since 2015, so you can follow "Fix CORS Error| React Tutorial" which points to:
"Run Chrome browser without CORS" (not recommended, just for testing)
axios/axios issue 853
That last issue mentions:
cURL does not enforce CORS rules. Those rules are enforced by browsers for security purposes.
When you mention that you added the relevant header, I assume you mean you added those headers to the request.
Actually, the header is expected in the response headers from the server, indicating that the resource is allowed to be accessed by other websites directly.
FYI, CORS - Cross Origin Resource Sharing. Since your API does not support it, you have two options -
Use a proxy server on the same domain as your webpage to access 4chan's API or,
Use a proxy server on any other domain, but modify the response to include the necessary headers.
basically my problems is use set-cookie header with angular (looks like he is ignored even with the withCredentials set to true) but here is the problem if i make the same request the cookies go, but if i change the path does't work.
Example;
POST http://localhost/app/api/oauth/ HTTP/1.1
[other headers and payload]
then i get the answer:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Set-Cookie: ; expires=Wed, 31-Mar-2015 01:34:53 GMT
and send a request to access a resource:
GET http://localhost/app/api/oauth/test HTTP/1.1
Cookie:blah=something;
until now evething is ok, but when i try to access other resources on my server:
GET http://localhost/app/api/othercontroller/test HTTP/1.1
the cookie is not send anymore, only if i access some path after the path that create the cookie.
that is what network monitor show me. But i can't see that blah coockie on the resource tab (on cookie area).
Note: i already try use secure cookie or not and use http only cookie or not and all combinations between both of then. And i try don't use CORS or enable CORS, but anyone work too.
Anyone know what can be ?
Thanks for you time and patience.
I'm pasting my suggestion from my comment.
Your initial cookie is set in a response of a HTTP endpoint path that is deeper than your second request.
Set-Cookie: ; Domain=foo.com; Path=/; expires=Wed, 31-Mar-2015 01:34:53 GMT
You may specify where to put your cookie by specifying a Path parameter in your response header like given above.
I've been developing a small Silverlight client, which will talk to a REST service build using the WCF WEBAPI....
When the service is called using GET, it'll kick of a long running process, that'll generate a resource, so the service will return 'Accepted' and a URI in a Location header, to where the resource will be found.
Server: ASP.NET Development Server/10.0.0.0
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:00:17 GMT
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
Content-Length: 3
Location: http://localhost:52878/myservice?fileid=f68201f6-9d77-4818-820e-e5e796e9710a
Cache-Control public, max-age=21600
Expires: 21600
Content-Type: text/plain
Connection: Close
Now, in my Silverlight client, I need to access this header information, however using the BrowserHTTP stack, this is not possible... so I've switched to the ClientHTTP, which makes it possible for me to access the header information returned.
However the ClientHTTP stack doesn't support Content Caching:
http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jprosise/archive/2009/10/14/silverlight-3-s-new-client-networking-stack.aspx
which is causing me troubles..... I wan't the same resource to be returned for 6 hours, before a new one is generated.
Is there a way to get the best of both... being able to access the Header info AND have content caching??
TIA
Søren
Stop using a header to return the information needed by the client code.
If you include the required information in the entity body using either raw or encoded in some message format (e.g. XML or JSON) then you can continue to use the BrowserHTTP and benefit from its caching.
Using the headers is the correct way to convey this information. That's why it's in the standard.
I don't do silverlight, but what I get from that post is that you will now need to implement the caching. Using the BrowserHttp leverages the browsers caching mechanism. Now using ClientHttp you are dropping closer to the metal and you will have to implement caching.