Node Express Cors issue - node.js

Question

I cant figure why the cors express middleware wont work. cors, express, and ejs are all saved in package.json. The app works fine if I add corsanywhere proxy on the front end but id like to work around this on the server side. any help much appreciated I've been stuck on this.
the api is in the get View/index path
the error is:
Access to fetch at 'https://api.darksky.net/forecast/' from origin 'http://localhost:3000' has been blocked by CORS policy: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. If an opaque response serves your needs, set the request's mode to 'no-cors' to fetch the resource with CORS disabled.
const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const ejs = require('ejs');
const cors = require('cors');
const PORT = process.env.PORT || 3000;
// app.use((req, res, next) => {
// res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', '*')
// res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Headers', 'Origin', 'X-Requested-With')
// next();
// });
app.use(cors());
app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/Public'));
app.set('view engine', 'ejs');
app.get('/', cors(), (req, res) => {
res.render(__dirname + '/Views/index')
});
app.listen(PORT, () => {
console.log(`server is listening on ${PORT}`)
});
client side:
it works with the ${proxy} in there but id like to get rid of that
if(navigator.geolocation){
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(position => {
long = position.coords.longitude;
lat = position.coords.latitude;
var proxy = 'https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/'
var api = `${proxy}https://api.darksky.net/forecast/042750f3abefefdfe2c9d43cf33ce576/${lat},${long}`;
fetch(api)
.then(response => {
return response.json();
})
.then(data => {
let {temperature, summary, icon,} = data.currently;
temperatureDegree.textContent = Math.floor(temperature);
temperatureDescription.textContent = summary;
locationTimezone.textContent = data.timezone;
setIcons(icon, document.querySelector('.icon'
w
``````

Answer 1

So, if you're trying to access some other service https://api.darksky.net/forecast/ (that you don't control) from your web page, then there is nothing you can do to make CORs work for that. It's up to the api.darksky.net server to decide if CORs is allowed or not. You can't change that.
You could make a request from your web page to your server to ask it to get some data from api.darksky.net for you and then return it back to your webpage (working as a simple proxy). Your server is not subject to any CORs limitations when accessing api.darksky.net. Only browsers are limited by CORs.
And, as you've found, you can also use a proxy service that enables CORs and fetches data for you.
Let's suppose you want to proxy the parts of the darksky API, you could do something simple like this:
const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const request = require('request');
const apiRouter = express.Router();
// maps /api/forecast/whatever to http://api.darksky.net/forecast/developerKey/whatever
// and pipes the response back
const apiKey = "yourAPIKeyHere";
apiRouter.get("/*", (req, res, next) => {
// parse out action and params
// from an incoming URL of /api/forecast/42.3601,-71.0589
// the /api will be the root of the router (so not in the URL here)
// "forecast" will be the action
// "42.3601,-71.0589" will be the params
let parts = req.path.slice(1).split("/"); // split into path segments, skipping leading /
let action = parts[0]; // take first path segment as the action
let params = parts.slice(1).join("/"); // take everything else for params
request({
uri: `https://api.darksky.net/${action}/${apiKey}/${params}`,
method: "get"
}).pipe(res);
});
app.use("/api", apiRouter);
app.listen(80);
Now, when you send this server, this request:
/api/forecast/42.3601,-71.0589
it will request:
https://api.darksky.net/forecast/yourAPIKeyHere/42.3601,-71.0589
and pipe the result back to the caller. I ran this test app and it worked for me. While I didn't see anything other than forecast URLs in the darksky.net API, it would work for anything of the format /api/someAction/someParams.
Note, you probably do NOT want to enable CORS on your server because you don't want other people's web pages to be able to use your proxy. And, since you're just sending requests to your own server now, you don't need CORS to be able to do that.