How do I add Access-Control-Allow-Origin in NGINX?

Question

How do I set the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header so I can use web-fonts from my subdomain on my main domain?

Notes:

You'll find examples of this and other headers for most HTTP servers in the HTML5BP Server Configs projects https://github.com/h5bp/server-configs

score 286 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 20 '16 at 10:54

286

Nginx has to be compiled with http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpHeadersModule (default on Ubuntu and some other Linux distros). Then you can do this

location ~* \.(eot|ttf|woff|woff2)$ {
    add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin *;
}

edited Oct 20 '16 at 10:54

XtraSimplicity

129

answered Sep 01 '10 at 00:25

hellvinz

3,306

score 86 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 24 '25 at 14:03

wildcard cors

A more up-to-date answer:

#
# Wide-open CORS config for nginx
#
location / {
   if ($request_method = 'OPTIONS') {
      add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' '*';
      #
      # Om nom nom cookies
      #
      add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';
      add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET, POST, OPTIONS';
      #
      # Custom headers and headers various browsers *should* be OK with but aren't
      #
      add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'DNT,X-CustomHeader,Keep-Alive,User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since,Cache-Control,Content-Type';
      #
      # Tell client that this pre-flight info is valid for 20 days
      #
      add_header 'Access-Control-Max-Age' 1728000;
      add_header 'Content-Type' 'text/plain charset=UTF-8';
      add_header 'Content-Length' 0;
      return 204;
   }
   if ($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';
   }
}

source: https://michielkalkman.com/snippets/nginx-cors-open-configuration.html

You may also wish to add Access-Control-Expose-Headers (in the same format as Access-Control-Allow-Headers) in order to expose your custom and/or 'non-simple' headers to ajax requests.

Access-Control-Expose-Headers (optional) - The XMLHttpRequest 2 object has a getResponseHeader() method that returns the value of a particular response header. During a CORS request, the getResponseHeader() method can only access simple response headers. Simple response headers are defined as follows:

Cache-Control Content-Language Content-Type Expires Last-Modified Pragma If you want clients to be able to access other headers, you have to use the Access-Control-Expose-Headers header. The value of this header is a comma- delimited list of response headers you want to expose to the client.

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/cors/

Configs for other web servers http://enable-cors.org/server.html

Access-Control-Allow-Credentials

If you're using Access-Control-Allow-Credentials with your CORS request you'll want the cors header wiring within your location to resemble this. As the origin has to match the client domain, wildcard doesn't work.

if ($http_origin = ''){
   set $http_origin "*";
}
proxy_hide_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin;
add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin $http_origin;

score 41 · Answer 3 · edited Jun 18 '24 at 00:07

Here is the article that I wrote which avoids some of the duplication for GET|POST. It should get you going with CORS in Nginx.

nginx access control allow origin

Here is the sample snippet from the post:

server {
    listen      80;
    server_name api.test.com;
location / {
    # Preflighted requests
    if ($request_method = OPTIONS ) {
        add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin'  '*';
        add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET, POST, OPTIONS, HEAD';
        add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'Authorization, Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Accept';

        return 200;
    }

    if ($request_method ~* '(GET|POST)') {
        add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' '*';
    }

    # Handle request
    # ...
}

}

score 30 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 17 '19 at 11:46

In some cases you need to use add_header directives with always to cover all HTTP response codes.

location / {
    add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' '*' always;
}

From documentation:

If the always parameter is specified (1.7.5), the header field will be added regardless of the response code.

Adds the specified field to a response header provided that the response code equals 200, 201 (1.3.10), 204, 206, 301, 302, 303, 304, 307 (1.1.16, 1.0.13), or 308 (1.13.0). Parameter value can contain variables.

score 13 · Answer 5 · edited Aug 04 '17 at 01:40

Firstly, let me say that @hellvinz answer is working for me:

location ~* \.(eot|ttf|woff|woff2)$ {
    add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin *;
}

However, I have decided to answer this question with a separate answer as I only managed to get this solution working after putting in about ten more hours looking for a solution.

It seems that Nginx doesn't define any (correct) font MIME types by default. By following this tuorial I found I could add the following:

application/x-font-ttf           ttc ttf;
application/x-font-otf           otf;
application/font-woff            woff;
application/font-woff2           woff2;
application/vnd.ms-fontobject    eot;

To my etc/nginx/mime.types file. As stated, the above solution then worked.

score 10 · Answer 6 · edited Aug 07 '18 at 19:07

Nginx's traditional add_header directive doesn't work with 4xx responses. As we still want to add custom headers to them, we need to install the ngx_headers_more module to be able to use the more_set_headers directive, which also works with 4xx responses.

sudo apt-get install nginx-extras

Then use more_set_headers in the nginx.conf file, i have pasted my sample below

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example-site.com;
    root "/home/vagrant/projects/example-site/public";

    index index.html index.htm index.php;

    charset utf-8;

    more_set_headers 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin: $http_origin';
    more_set_headers 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, OPTIONS, PUT, DELETE, HEAD';
    more_set_headers 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true';
    more_set_headers 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Origin,Content-Type,Accept,Authorization';

    location / {
        if ($request_method = 'OPTIONS') {
            more_set_headers 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin: $http_origin';
            more_set_headers 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, OPTIONS, PUT, DELETE, HEAD';
            more_set_headers 'Access-Control-Max-Age: 1728000';
            more_set_headers 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true';
            more_set_headers 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Origin,Content-Type,Accept,Authorization';
            more_set_headers 'Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8';
            more_set_headers 'Content-Length: 0';
            return 204;
        }
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }

    access_log off;
    error_log  /var/log/nginx/example-site.com-error.log error;

    sendfile off;

    client_max_body_size 100m;

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_intercept_errors off;
        fastcgi_buffer_size 16k;
        fastcgi_buffers 4 16k;
    }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }
}

score 4 · Answer 7 · answered Feb 04 '22 at 17:41

In my case adding the Access Control with a wildcard header didn't work. I ended up having to set the proxy header with my web apps host and Access Control header with the origin set. Here's an example that worked for me:

location /service {
    proxy_pass http://graphql-server:8080;
    proxy_set_header Origin http://graphql-server:8080;
    proxy_hide_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin;
    add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin "$http_origin" always;
}

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Apr 23 '25 at 13:24

I spent the last few days banging my head against the wall trying to resolve this issue, but could never get it to work.

Reason: I was loading the nginx website in a jQuery div tag. I am going to assume this is not allowed for CORS.

Solution: Load the nginx page in an IFRAME.

<iframe 
src="https://stream.website.com:9443/Radio.html" 
title="Your Channel"></iframe>

Using this method, there is no need for CORS code in your site-enabled/website.

I hope this will help someone, as it sure made my morning when I decided to use it.

score 0 · Answer 9 · answered May 04 '18 at 23:07

In my case, using Rails 5, the only working solution has been adding the rack-cors gem. Like so:

in /Gemfile

# Gemfile
gem 'rack-cors'

in config/initializers/cors.rb

# config/initializers/cors.rb
Rails.application.config.middleware.insert_before 0, Rack::Cors do
  allow do
    origins 'localhost:4200'
    resource '*',
      headers: :any,
      methods: %i(get post put patch delete options head)
  end
end

source: https://til.hashrocket.com/posts/4d7f12b213-rails-5-api-and-cors

How do I add Access-Control-Allow-Origin in NGINX?

9 Answers9

wildcard cors

Access-Control-Allow-Credentials

Linked