How I fixed the OPTIONS problem between React Native and Django

I recently started a new project that needed a backend built with Django and a frontend built with React Native. I was excited to get started, but I quite quickly ran into a problem. I had my API endpoint set up in Django, and I tried to fetch it from my React Native app, but the only thing I could see was that my Django server was receiving an OPTIONS request, which seemed strange to me since I had used axios and POST to make the request.

After some research, I found out that this was a CORS problem. Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is a security feature implemented by web browsers to restrict web pages from making requests to a different origin (domain, protocol, or port) than the one that served the original page. It is a mechanism that enables servers to specify which origins are permitted to access their resources, thereby preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data. CORS plays a crucial role in ensuring secure communication between web applications hosted on different domains while still allowing controlled access to shared resources.

So how did I fix this? It’s actually rather simple, and here’s the concise steps I took to fix it:

1. Install django-cors-headers in your Django project:

   pip install django-cors-headers

2. Add corsheaders to your INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py:

    INSTALLED_APPS = [
         ...
         'corsheaders',
         ...
    ]

3. Add CorsMiddleware to your MIDDLEWARE in settings.py:

    MIDDLEWARE = [
         ...
         'corsheaders.middleware.CorsMiddleware',
    ]

4. Configure CORS settings in settings.py:

   CORS_ALLOWED_ORIGINS = [
        "http://localhost:PORT",
   ]

   Replace PORT with the port number your React Native app is running on.

While you can use CORS_ORIGIN_ALLOW_ALL = True to allow all origins, it is not recommended for production environments due to security concerns.

5. Restart your Django server.

After following these steps, I was able to successfully make requests from my React Native app to my Django backend without any CORS issues. I hope this helps you fix your CORS problems as well!

Wrap-up

By following these steps, you should be able to fix your requests between your React Native application and your Django backend.