How to enable CORS in Nginx proxy server?

As my title, here is the config file located in conf.d/api-server.conf

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name api.localhost;

  location / {
    add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' 'http://api.localhost';
    add_header 'Access-Control-Allow_Credentials' 'true';
    add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'Authorization,Accept,Origin,DNT,X-CustomHeader,Keep-Alive,User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since,Cache-Control,Content-Type,Content-Range,Range';
    add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET,POST,OPTIONS,PUT,DELETE,PATCH';

    if ($request_method = 'OPTIONS') {
      add_header 'Access-Control-Max-Age' 1728000;
      add_header 'Content-Type' 'text/plain charset=UTF-8';
      add_header 'Content-Length' 0;
      return 204;
    }

    proxy_redirect off;
    proxy_set_header host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-real-ip $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-forward-for $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
  }
}

The nginx.conf file stay the same as default.

After I send request to api.localhost (api.localhost/admin/login), I still receive 405 error:

XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://api.localhost/admin/login. Response 
to preflight request doesn't pass access control check: No 'Access-
Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. 
Origin 'http://admin.localhost:3000' is therefore not allowed access. 
The response had HTTP status code 405.

That is the response from server That's the request looks like


The issue is that your if condition is not going to send the headers in the parent in /. If you check the preflight response headers it would be

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Server: nginx/1.13.3
Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2017 05:24:04 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Access-Control-Max-Age: 1728000
Content-Type: text/plain charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 0

And that doesn't give anything. So two possible fixes for you. Copy the add_header inside if block also

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name api.localhost;

  location / {
    add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' 'http://api.localhost';
    add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';
    add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'Authorization,Accept,Origin,DNT,X-CustomHeader,Keep-Alive,User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since,Cache-Control,Content-Type,Content-Range,Range';
    add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET,POST,OPTIONS,PUT,DELETE,PATCH';

    if ($request_method = 'OPTIONS') {
      add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' 'http://api.localhost';
      add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';
      add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'Authorization,Accept,Origin,DNT,X-CustomHeader,Keep-Alive,User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since,Cache-Control,Content-Type,Content-Range,Range';
      add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET,POST,OPTIONS,PUT,DELETE,PATCH';
      add_header 'Access-Control-Max-Age' 1728000;
      add_header 'Content-Type' 'text/plain charset=UTF-8';
      add_header 'Content-Length' 0;
      return 204;
    }

    proxy_redirect off;
    proxy_set_header host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-real-ip $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-forward-for $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
  }
}

Or you can move it outside the location block, so every request has the response

server {
   listen 80;
   server_name api.localhost;

   add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' 'http://api.localhost';
   add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';
   add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'Authorization,Accept,Origin,DNT,X-CustomHeader,Keep-Alive,User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since,Cache-Control,Content-Type,Content-Range,Range';
   add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET,POST,OPTIONS,PUT,DELETE,PATCH';

  location / {

    if ($request_method = 'OPTIONS') {
      add_header 'Access-Control-Max-Age' 1728000;
      add_header 'Content-Type' 'text/plain charset=UTF-8';
      add_header 'Content-Length' 0;
      return 204;
    }

    proxy_redirect off;
    proxy_set_header host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-real-ip $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-forward-for $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
  }
}

If you only want to allow certain locations in your config for CORS. like /api then you should create a template conf with your headers

 add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' 'http://api.localhost';
 add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';
 add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'Authorization,Accept,Origin,DNT,X-CustomHeader,Keep-Alive,User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since,Cache-Control,Content-Type,Content-Range,Range';
 add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET,POST,OPTIONS,PUT,DELETE,PATCH';

and then use

include conf.d/corsheaders.conf;

in your OPTIONS block and /api block. So CORS are only allowed for the /api. If you don't care which location for CORS then you can use the second approach of moving core headers to server block