Set cookies for cross origin requests

Question

How to share cookies cross origin  More specifically  how to use the Set-Cookie header in combination with the header Access-Control-Allow-Origin   Here s an explanation of my situation   I am attempting to set a cookie for an API that is running on localhost 4000 in a web app that is hosted on localhost 3000    It seems I m receiving the right response headers in the browser  but unfortunately they have no effect  These are the response headers    HTTP 1 1 200 OK Access-Control-Allow-Origin  http   localhost 3000 Vary  Origin  Accept-Encoding Set-Cookie  token 0d522ba17e130d6d19eb9c25b7ac58387b798639f81ffe75bd449afbc3cc715d6b038e426adeac3316f0511dc7fae3f7  Max-Age 86400  Domain localhost 4000  Path    Expires Tue  19 Sep 2017 21 11 36 GMT  HttpOnly Content-Type  application json  charset utf-8 Content-Length  180 ETag  W  b4-VNrmF4xNeHGeLrGehNZTQNwAaUQ  Date  Mon  18 Sep 2017 21 11 36 GMT Connection  keep-alive   Furthermore  I can see the cookie under Response Cookies when I inspect the traffic using the Network tab of Chrome s developer tools  Yet  I can t see a cookie being set in in the Application tab under Storage Cookies  I don t see any CORS errors  so I assume I m missing something else   Any suggestions   Update I   I m using the request module in a React-Redux app to issue a request to a  signin endpoint on the server  For the server I use express   Express server    res cookie  token    xxx-xxx-xxx     maxAge  86400000  httpOnly  true  domain   localhost 3000       Request in browser    request post   uri    signin   json    userName   userOne   password   123456      err  response  body              doing stuff     Update II   I am setting request and response headers now like crazy now  making sure that they are present in both the request and the response  Below is a screenshot  Notice the headers Access-Control-Allow-Credentials  Access-Control-Allow-Headers  Access-Control-Allow-Methods and Access-Control-Allow-Origin  Looking at the issue I found at Axios s github  I m under the impression that all required headers are now set  Yet  there s still no luck

User · Answer

Pim s answer is very helpful  In my case  I have to use  Expires   Max-Age   Session    If it is a dateTime  even it is not expired  it still won t send the cookie to the backend   Expires   Max-Age   Thu  21 May 2020 09 00 34 GMT    Hope it is helpful for future people who may meet same issue

User · Answer

For express  upgrade your express library to 4 17 1 which is the latest stable version  Then  In CorsOption  Set origin to your localhost url or your frontend production url and credentials to true e g   const corsOptions         origin  config get  quot origin quot        credentials  true        I set my origin dynamically using config npm module  Then   in res cookie  For localhost  you do not need to set sameSite and secure option at all  you can set httpOnly to true for http cookie to prevent XSS attack and other useful options depending on your use case  For production environment  you need to set sameSite to none for cross-origin request and secure to true  Remember sameSite works with express latest version only as at now and latest chrome version only set cookie over https  thus the need for secure option  Here is how I made mine dynamic  res      cookie  quot access token quot   token          httpOnly  true        sameSite  app get  quot env quot        quot development quot    true    quot none quot         secure  app get  quot env quot        quot development quot    false   true

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What you need to do To allow receiving  amp  sending cookies by a CORS request successfully  do the following  Back-end  server   Set the HTTP header Access-Control-Allow-Credentials value to true  Also  make sure the HTTP headers Access-Control-Allow-Origin and Access-Control-Allow-Headers are set and not with a wildcard    Recommended Cookie settings per Chrome and Firefox update in 2021  SameSite None and Secure  See MDN documentation For more info on setting CORS in express js read the docs here Front-end  client   Set the XMLHttpRequest withCredentials flag to true  this can be achieved in different ways depending on the request-response library used   jQuery 1 5 1 xhrFields   withCredentials  true   ES6 fetch   credentials   include   axios  withCredentials  true   Or Avoid having to use CORS in combination with cookies  You can achieve this with a proxy  If you for whatever reason don t avoid it  The solution is above  It turned out that Chrome won t set the cookie if the domain contains a port  Setting it for localhost  without port  is not a problem  Many thanks to Erwin for this tip

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In order for the client to be able to read cookies from cross-origin requests  you need to have   All responses from the server need to have the following in their header  Access-Control-Allow-Credentials  true  The client needs to send all requests with withCredentials  true option   In my implementation with Angular 7 and Spring Boot  I achieved that with the following   Server-side   CrossOrigin origins    quot http   my-cross-origin-url com quot   allowCredentials    quot true quot    Controller  RequestMapping path    quot  something quot   public class SomethingController            The origins    quot http   my-cross-origin-url com quot  part will add Access-Control-Allow-Origin  http   my-cross-origin-url com to every server s response header The allowCredentials    quot true quot  part will add Access-Control-Allow-Credentials  true to every server s response header  which is what we need in order for the client to read the cookies  Client-side  import   HttpInterceptor  HttpXsrfTokenExtractor  HttpRequest  HttpHandler  HttpEvent   from  quot  angular common http quot   import   Injectable   from  quot  angular core quot   import   Observable   from  rxjs     Injectable   export class CustomHttpInterceptor implements HttpInterceptor        constructor private tokenExtractor  HttpXsrfTokenExtractor               intercept req  HttpRequest lt any gt   next  HttpHandler   Observable lt HttpEvent lt any gt  gt               send request with credential options in order to be able to read cross-origin cookies         req   req clone   withCredentials  true                 return XSRF-TOKEN in each request s header  anti-CSRF security          const headerName    X-XSRF-TOKEN           let token   this tokenExtractor getToken   as string          if  token     null  amp  amp   req headers has headerName                 req   req clone   headers  req headers set headerName  token                        return next handle req            With this class you actually inject additional stuff to all your request  The first part req   req clone   withCredentials  true      is what you need in order to send each request with withCredentials  true option  This practically means that an OPTION request will be send first  so that you get your cookies and the authorization token among them  before sending the actual POST PUT DELETE requests  which need this token attached to them  in the header   in order for the server to verify and execute the request  The second part is the one that specifically handles an anti-CSRF token for all requests  Reads it from the cookie when needed and writes it in the header of every request  The desired result is something like this

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Note for Chrome Browser released in 2020   A future release of Chrome will only deliver cookies with cross-site requests if they are set with SameSite None and Secure   So if your backend server does not set SameSite None  Chrome will use SameSite Lax by default and will not use this cookie with   withCredentials  true   requests  More info https   www chromium org updates same-site  Firefox and Edge developers also want to release this feature in the future  Spec found here  https   tools ietf org html draft-west-cookie-incrementalism-01 page-8

[authentication] Set cookies for cross origin requests

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