Those who often read this blog already know that we're deeply in love with NGINX, a lightweight, high-performance and open-source web server and reverse proxy used by more than 358 million websites and over 66% of the world’s top 10,000 websites. And no, we're not taking money from them to say this, we just happen to like it a lot.
Anyway, in this post I'll briefly share the CORS configuration I'm using for the web sites that need to perform Cross Request Resource Sharing activities of any kind - such as using web-fonts from a subdomain on a main domain, or something like that:
location / {
if ($request_method = 'OPTIONS') {
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' '*';
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET, POST, OPTIONS';
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'DNT,X-CustomHeader,Keep-Alive,User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since,Cache-Control,Content-Type';
add_header 'Access-Control-Max-Age' 1728000;
add_header 'Content-Type' 'text/plain charset=UTF-8';
add_header 'Content-Length' 0;
return 204;
}
if ($request_method = 'POST') {
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' '*';
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET, POST, OPTIONS';
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'DNT,X-CustomHeader,Keep-Alive,User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since,Cache-Control,Content-Type';
}
if ($request_method = 'GET') {
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' '*';
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET, POST, OPTIONS';
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'DNT,X-CustomHeader,Keep-Alive,User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since,Cache-Control,Content-Type';
}
}
Since it's a pretty long piece of code, you might want to put this on a separate file (such as /etc/nginx/cors-settings.conf ) and then include it with the following one-liner:
include /etc/nginx/cors-settings.conf;
Pretty neat, isn't it?
If you're looking for further info about how to set & configure other NGINX security headers, such as X-Frame-Options, HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), X-XSS-Protection, X-Content-Type-Options, Content Security Policy and Referrer Policy, be sure to check our NGINX HTTP Security Headers guide.
Read the full article
