HTTP request from Angular sent as OPTIONS instead of POST

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TL;DR answer

Explanation

The OPTIONS request is so called pre-flight request, which is part of Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS). Browsers use it to check if a request is allowed from a particular domain as follows:

  1. The browser wants to send a request to a particular URL, let’s say a POST request with the application/json content type
  2. First, it sends the pre-flight OPTIONS request to the same URL
  3. What follows depends on the pre-flight request’s response HTTP status code:
    • If the server replies with a non-2XX status response, the browser won’t send the actual request (because he knows now that it would be refused anyway)
    • If the server replies with a HTTP 200 OK (or any other 2XX) response, the browser will send the actual request, POST in your case

Solution

So, in your case, the proper header is present, you just have to make sure the pre-flight request’s response HTTP status code is 200 OK or some other successful one (2XX).

Detailed Explanation

Simple requests

Browsers are not sending the pre-flight requests in some cases, those are so-called simple requests and are used in the following conditions:

  • One of the allowed methods:
    – GET
    – HEAD
    – POST
  • Apart from the headers automatically set by the user agent (for example, Connection, User-Agent, etc.), the only headers which are allowed to be manually set are the following:
    • 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.

Such requests are sent directly and the server simply successfully processes the request or replies with an error in case it didn’t match the CORS rules. In any case, the response will contain the CORS headers Access-Control-Allow-*.

Pre-flighted requests

Browsers are sending the pre-flight requests if the actual request doesn’t meet the simple request conditions, the most usually:

  • custom content types like application/xml or application/json, etc., are used
  • the request method is other than GET, HEAD or POST
  • the POST method is of an another content type than application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data or text/plain

You need to make sure that the response to the pre-flight request has the following attributes:

  • successful HTTP status code, i.e. 200 OK
  • header Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * (a wildcard * allows a request from any domain, you can use any specific domain to restrict the access here of course)

From the other side, the server may refuse the CORS request simply by sending a response to the pre-flight request with the following attributes:

  • non-success HTTP code (i.e. other than 2XX)
  • success HTTP code (e.g. 200 OK), but without any CORS header (i.e. Access-Control-Allow-*)

See the documentation on Mozilla Developer Network or for example HTML5Rocks’ CORS tutorial for details.

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