Enabling Cross-Origin Resource Sharing CORS for PHP

This post is an addition to Enabling Cross-Origin Resource Sharing CORS for Apache to show you how to enable Cross-Origin Resource Sharing CORS for PHP. Thus, in case you don’t have access to the .htaccess you can simply enable CORS for PHP using the following steps.

Setting required headers using PHP

As explained in Enabling Cross-Origin Resource Sharing CORS for Apache you need to make sure that responses to cross-domain requests to your server (e.g. through Ajax requests using jQuery) need to include a set of required headers to be accepted by the client browser. These are

1. Access-Control-Allow-Origin
2. Access-Control-Allow-Methods
3. Access-Control-Max-Age
4. Access-Control-Allow-Headers

Make sure that Access-Control-Allow-Origin is set a domain value actually allowed by your server. In theory you could use ‘*‘ as well, but some browsers (e.g. Firefox) will simply ignore it and CORS will not work.

PHP code to enable CORS

The following snippet should give you a quick overview about the required HTTP headers to set for CORS to work.

First, it defines a list of allowed origin domains based on regular expressions. This list will be checked against $_SERVER[‘HTTP_ORIGIN’], i.e. the Origin header specified in the client request. If one origin entry from the list matches the required CORS headers will be set. This setup also takes care of the CORS pre-flight request.

// array holding allowed Origin domains
$allowedOrigins = array(
  '(http(s)://)?(www\.)?my\-domain\.com'
);

if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ORIGIN']) && $_SERVER['HTTP_ORIGIN'] != '') {
  foreach ($allowedOrigins as $allowedOrigin) {
    if (preg_match('#' . $allowedOrigin . '#', $_SERVER['HTTP_ORIGIN'])) {
      header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: ' . $_SERVER['HTTP_ORIGIN']);
      header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, OPTIONS');
      header('Access-Control-Max-Age: 1000');
      header('Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type, Authorization, X-Requested-With');
      break;
    }
  }
}