Summary

JIRA doesn't support preflighted requests for CORS. There are a couple of problems:

• It doesn't respect content of Access-Control-Request-Method header
• It doesn't reply with Access-Control-Allow... headers

Problem1

Steps to Reproduce

1. Configure CORS at JIRA for domain 'http://mysite.com'
2. Fire the OPTIONS REST call with Origin and Access-Control-Request-... headers.

   curl -v -uadmin:admin -X OPTIONS -H 'Access-Control-Request-Method: GET' -H 'Access-Control-Request-Headers: authorization' -H 'Origin: http://mysite.com'  http://127.0.0.1:8081/rest/api/latest/issue/PRG-4 -o /dev/null
   
   > OPTIONS /rest/api/latest/issue/PRG-4 HTTP/1.1
   > Access-Control-Request-Method: GET
   > Access-Control-Request-Headers: authorization
   > Origin: http://mysite.com
   

   Please note that performing certain types of cross-domain AJAX requests, modern browsers that support CORS will insert an extra "preflight" request to determine whether they have permission to perform the action. Eg. Firefox uses "preflight" request for methods other than GET, HEAD or POST.

Expected Results

Response has header with following content:

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://mysite.com
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: OPTIONS, GET, PUT, DELETE
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
Access-Control-Expose-Headers: Origin, Authorization, Content-Type

Actual Results

Response has header with following content:

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK

No Access-Control-Allow... headers

Problem2

Steps to Reproduce

1. Configure CORS at JIRA for domain 'http://mysite.com'
2. Fire the OPTIONS REST call with Origin and Access-Control-Request-Method headers.

   curl -v -X OPTIONS -u admin:1 -H 'Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8' -H 'Origin: http://mysite.com' -H 'Access-Control-Request-Method: PUT' http://127.0.0.1:8080/rest/api/2/issue/DRA-2/properties/10000 -o /dev/nul
   
   > Origin: http://mysite.com
   > Access-Control-Request-Method: PUT
   

   Please note that performing certain types of cross-domain AJAX requests, modern browsers that support CORS will insert an extra "preflight" request to determine whether they have permission to perform the action. Eg. Firefox uses "preflight" request for methods other than GET, HEAD or POST.

Expected Results

Response has header with following content:

Access-Control-Allow-Methods: OPTIONS, GET, PUT, DELETE
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Authorization, Content-Type

Actual Results

Response has header with following content:

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
....
< X-ASESSIONID: qszqfh
< X-AUSERNAME: admin
< Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://mysite.com
< Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
< Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type
< Access-Control-Allow-Methods: OPTIONS

And the leads to error message in browser:

• Method PUT is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Methods in preflight response.
  • OR
• Request header field Authorization is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Headers in preflight response

Notes

Please see specification for details:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Access_control_CORS
• http://www.w3.org/TR/access-control/#preflight-request

Workaround

Setup a proxy and rewrite Access-Control-Request-Method header. See for example: Apache, as a proxy