Deadly CORS when http://localhost is the origin

Question

I am stuck with this CORS problem, even though I set the server (nginx/node.js) with the appropriate headers.

I can see in Chrome Network pane -> Response Headers:

Access-Control-Allow-Origin:http://localhost

which should do the trick.

Here's the code that I now use to test:

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.onload = function() {
   console.log('xhr loaded');
};
xhr.open('GET', 'http://stackoverflow.com/');
xhr.send();

I get

XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://stackoverflow.com/. Origin http://localhost is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.

I suspect it's a problem in the client script and not server configuration...

Answer 1

Chrome does not support localhost for CORS requests (a bug opened in 2010, marked WontFix in 2014).

To get around this you can use a domain like lvh.me (which points at 127.0.0.1 just like localhost) or start chrome with the --disable-web-security flag (assuming you're just testing).