I've developed a small write-only REST api with Flask Restful that accepts PUT request from a handful of clients that can potentially have changing IP addresses. My clients are embedded Chromium clients running an AngularJS front-end; they authenticate with my API with a simple magic key -- it's sufficient for my very limited scale.
I'm testing deploying my API now and I notice that the Angular clients are attempting to send an OPTIONS http methods to my Flask service. My API meanwhile is replying with a 404 (since I didn't write an OPTIONS handler yet, only a PUT handler). It seems that when sending cross-domain requests that are not POST or GET, Angular will send a pre-flight OPTIONS method at the server to make sure the cross-domain request is accepted before it sends the actual request. Is that right?
Anyway, how do I allow all cross-domain PUT requests to Flask Restful API? I've used cross-domaion decorators with a (non-restful) Flask instance before, but do I need to write an OPTIONS handler as well into my API?
I resolved the issue by rewriting my Flask backend to answer with an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header in my PUT response. Furthermore, I created an OPTIONS handler in my Flask app to answer the options method by following what I read in the http RFC.
The return on the PUT method looks like this:
return restful.request.form, 201, {'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*'}
My OPTIONS method handler looks like this:
def options (self):
return {'Allow' : 'PUT' }, 200, \
{ 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*', \
'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' : 'PUT,GET' }
@tbicr is right: Flask DOES answer the OPTIONS method automatically for you. However, in my case it wasn't transmitting the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header with that answer, so my browser was getting a reply from the api that seemed to imply that cross-domain requests were not permitted. I overloaded the options request in my case and added the ACAO header, and the browser seemed to be satisfied with that, and followed up OPTIONS with a PUT that also worked.