CORS with POSTMAN
As @Musa comments it, it seems that the reason is that:
Postman doesn't care about SOP, it's a dev tool not a browser
By the way here's a chrome extension in order to make it work on your browser (this one is for chrome, but you can find either for FF or Safari).
Check here if you want to learn more about Cross-Origin and why it's working for extensions.
While all of the answers here are a really good explanation of what cors is but the direct answer to your question would be because of the following differences postman and browser.
Browser: Sends OPTIONS
call to check the server type and getting the headers before sending any new request to the API endpoint. Where it checks for Access-Control-Allow-Origin
. Taking this into account Access-Control-Allow-Origin
header just specifies which all CROSS ORIGINS are allowed, although by default browser will only allow the same origin.
Postman: Sends direct GET
, POST
, PUT
, DELETE
etc. request without checking what type of server is and getting the header Access-Control-Allow-Origin
by using OPTIONS
call to the server.
If you use a website and you fill out a form to submit information (your social security number for example) you want to be sure that the information is being sent to the site you think it's being sent to. So browsers were built to say, by default, 'Do not send information to a domain other than the domain being visited).
Eventually that became too limiting but the default idea still remains in browsers. Don't let the web page send information to a different domain. But this is all browser checking. Chrome and firefox, etc have built in code that says 'before send this request, we're going to check that the destination matches the page being visited'.
Postman (or CURL on the cmd line) doesn't have those built in checks. You're manually interacting with a site so you have full control over what you're sending.
CORS
(Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) and SOP
(Same-Origin Policy) are server-side configurations that clients decide to enforce or not.
Related to clients
- Most Browsers do enforce it to prevent issues related to
CSRF
attack. - Most Development tools don't care about it.