CORS preflight response doesn't match actual response - node.js

Question

In my node.js server I have included CORS as middleware like so:
app.use(cors({ origin: 'http://<CORRECT_ORIGIN_URL>:3030', credentials: true }))
I'm using Apollo Client in the app that sends the request, and have set credentials to 'include' when initialising ApolloClient, like so:
// Create a WebSocket link
const wsLink = process.browser ? new WebSocketLink({
uri: `ws://<CORRECT_REQUEST_URL>:8000/graphql`,
options: {
reconnect: true,
},
}) : null
// Create an http link (use batch, allow cookies response from server)
const httpLink = new BatchHttpLink({
uri: 'http://<CORRECT_REQUEST_URL>/api/',
credentials: 'include'
})
// Split terminating link for websocket and http requests
const terminatingLink = process.browser ? split(
({ query }) => {
const { kind, operation } = getMainDefinition(query)
return kind === 'OperationDefinition' && operation === 'subscription'
},
wsLink,
httpLink,
) : httpLink
// Create Apollo client
const client = new ApolloClient({
link: ApolloLink.from([authLink, errorLink, terminatingLink])
})
When I attempt to sign-in, I can see that a preflight OPTIONS request is sent and gets the correct response back:
Request Headers (OPTIONS request)
Access-Control-Request-Headers: content-type
Access-Control-Request-Method: POST
Origin: http://<CORRECT_ORIGIN_URL>:3030
Referer: http://<CORRECT_ORIGIN_URL>/login
Response Headers (OPTIONS request)
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: content-type
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET,HEAD,PUT,PATCH,POST,DELETE
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://<CORRECT_ORIGIN_URL>:3030
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 0
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2019 03:09:14 GMT
Server: nginx/1.15.5 (Ubuntu)
Vary: Origin, Access-Control-Request-Headers
X-Powered-By: Express
Yet when the actual POST request is sent, I get the following response:
Response Headers (POST request)
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2019 03:09:15 GMT
Server: nginx/1.15.5 (Ubuntu)
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Vary: Accept-Encoding, Origin
X-Powered-By: Express
I have no idea why the response headers are different in the post request when the options preflight show that it should be correct.
This incorrect POST response leads to the following error message on the client:
Access to fetch at 'http://<CORRECT_REQUEST_URL/api/' from origin
'http://<CORRECT_ORIGIN_URL>:3030' has been blocked by CORS policy:
The value of the 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header in the response
must not be the wildcard '*' when the request's credentials mode is
'include'.
I've tried googling and searching stackoverflow for a solution but can't find anything. Any ideas?

Answer 1

I solved my problem.
The issue is that Apollo Server adds CORS middleware by default, which was overriding my CORS settings. From Apollo's documentation:
Provide false to remove CORS middleware entirely, or true to use your
middleware's default configuration.
The default value is true.
To solve the issue, I simply had to disable CORS functionality in Apollo, which simply required setting cors: false in .applyMiddleware like so:
server.applyMiddleware({
app,
path: '/',
cors: false,
});
Further reference:
https://github.com/expressjs/cors/issues/134#issuecomment-413543241

Answer 2

I had similar issues with apache2 proxy running in front of my Express services. The proxy was caching some (only some!) of the responses. This is what I added to the apache config and it solved the problem:
Header set Cache-Control "no-cache, must-revalidate" env=no-cache-headers
Header set Pragma "no-cache" env=no-cache-headers
Header set Expires "Sat, 1 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT" env=no-cache-headers