tiangolo.fastapi/docs/tutorial/cors.md

CORS or "Cross-Origin Resource Sharing" refers to the situations when a frontend running in a browser has JavaScript code that communicates with a backend, and the backend is in a different "origin" than the frontend.

Origin

An origin is the combination of protocol (http, https), domain (myapp.com, localhost, localhost.tiangolo.com), and port (80, 443, 8080).

So, all these are different origins:

• http://localhost
• https://localhost
• http://localhost:8080

Even if they are all in localhost, they use different protocols or ports, so, they are different "origins".

Steps

So, let's say you have a frontend running in your browser at http://localhost:8080, and its JavaScript is trying to communicate with a backend running at http://localhost (because we don't specify a port, the browser will assume the default port 80).

Then, the browser will send an HTTP OPTIONS request to the backend, and if the backend sends the appropriate headers authorizing the communication from this different origin (http://localhost:8080) then the browser will let the JavaScript in the frontend send its request to the backend.

To achieve this, the backend must have a list of "allowed origins".

In this case, it would have to include http://localhost:8080 for the frontend to work correctly.

Wildcards

It's also possible to declare the list as "*" (a "wildcard") to say that all are allowed.

But that will only allow certain types of communication, excluding everything that involves credentials: Cookies, Authorization headers like those used with Bearer Tokens, etc.

So, for everything to work correctly, it's better to specify explicitly the allowed origins.

Use CORSMiddleware

You can configure it in your FastAPI application using Starlette's CORSMiddleware.

• Import it form Starlette.
• Create a list of allowed origins (as strings).
• Add it as a "middleware" to your FastAPI application.

You can also specify if your backend allows:

• Credentials (Authorization headers, Cookies, etc).
• Specific HTTP methods (POST, PUT) or all of them with the wildcard "*".
• Specific HTTP headers or all of them with the wildcard "*".

{!./src/cors/tutorial001.py!}

More info

For more details of what you can specify in CORSMiddleware, check Starlette's CORSMiddleware docs.

For more info about CORS, check the Mozilla CORS documentation.