It’s just a simple “trick” I came across while working at my latest project.

What we are sometimes faced with when working with an API hosted on another server is something named CORS.

A really simple solution is to configure a reverse proxy (NGINX / Apache) if you have a web server (if you don’t you can easily set up a local WAMP / LAMP server for dev purposes).

And setting up a reverse proxy in NGINX is much easier than doing it in Apache as it only takes a couple of lines.

I added this to server { } in my default config (/etc/nginx/sites-available/default):

location /api/ {
    proxy_set_header Authorization "Basic ZGV2OmRldg==";
    proxy_pass http://url.to.the.api/api/;
}

The simplest proxy wouldn’t need the proxy_set_header part but in my case I needed it because there was HTTP authentication in place. “ZGV2OmRldg==” is “username:password” Base64 encoded (without quotes).

Now, accessing localhost/api/ would be the same as accessing url.to.the.api/api/, which means that if you issue a GET request to localhost you are going to get one back from localhost instead of from across the internet – bye bye CORS!

Happy developing!