Why is an OPTIONS request sent and can I disable it?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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

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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.

Answer 2

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:

1. Make sure your request is a "simple request"
2. 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.

Answer 3

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:

1. Request does not set custom HTTP headers like 'application/xml' or 'application/json' etc
2. 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

Answer 4

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)

Answer 5

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/

Answer 6

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.

Answer 7

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.

Answer 8

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.

Answer 9

You can't but you could avoid CORS using JSONP.

Answer 10

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.

Answer 11

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:

1. Setup a reverse proxy for such requests with tools of choice (nginx, YARP, ...)
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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. :)

Answer 12

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.

Answer 13

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 :)

Answer 14

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;
}

}

Answer 15

There is maybe a solution (but i didnt test it) : you could use CSP (Content Security Policy) to enable your remote domain and browsers will maybe skip the CORS OPTIONS request verification.

I if find some time, I will test that and update this post !

CSP : https://developer.mozilla.org/fr/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Security-Policy

CSP Specification : https://www.w3.org/TR/CSP/