For security reasons, browsers prohibit AJAX calls to resources residing outside the current origin. For example, as you’re checking your bank account in one tab, you could have the evil.com website open in another tab. The scripts from evil.com should not be able to make AJAX requests to your bank API (e.g., withdrawing money from your account!) using your credentials.

Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a W3C specification implemented by most browsers that allows you to specify in a flexible way what kind of cross domain requests are authorized, instead of using some less secured and less powerful hacks like IFRAME or JSONP.

As of Spring Framework 4.2, CORS is supported out of the box. CORS requests (including preflight ones with an OPTIONS method) are automatically dispatched to the various registered HandlerMappings. They handle CORS preflight requests and intercept CORS simple and actual requests thanks to a CorsProcessor implementation (DefaultCorsProcessor by default) in order to add the relevant CORS response headers (like Access-Control-Allow-Origin) based on the CORS configuration you have provided.

	Note
	Since CORS requests are automatically dispatched, you do not need to change the DispatcherServlet dispatchOptionsRequest init parameter value; using its default value (false) is the recommended approach.

You can add an @CrossOrigin annotation to your @RequestMapping annotated handler method in order to enable CORS on it. By default @CrossOrigin allows all origins and the HTTP methods specified in the @RequestMapping annotation:

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/account")
public class AccountController {

	@CrossOrigin
	@RequestMapping("/{id}")
	public Account retrieve(@PathVariable Long id) {
		// ...
	}

	@RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.DELETE, path = "/{id}")
	public void remove(@PathVariable Long id) {
		// ...
	}
}

It is also possible to enable CORS for the whole controller:

@CrossOrigin(origins = "https://domain2.com", maxAge = 3600)
@RestController
@RequestMapping("/account")
public class AccountController {

	@RequestMapping("/{id}")
	public Account retrieve(@PathVariable Long id) {
		// ...
	}

	@RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.DELETE, path = "/{id}")
	public void remove(@PathVariable Long id) {
		// ...
	}
}

In the above example CORS support is enabled for both the retrieve() and the remove() handler methods, and you can also see how you can customize the CORS configuration using @CrossOrigin attributes.

You can even use both controller-level and method-level CORS configurations; Spring will then combine attributes from both annotations to create merged CORS configuration.

@CrossOrigin(maxAge = 3600)
@RestController
@RequestMapping("/account")
public class AccountController {

	@CrossOrigin("https://domain2.com")
	@RequestMapping("/{id}")
	public Account retrieve(@PathVariable Long id) {
		// ...
	}

	@RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.DELETE, path = "/{id}")
	public void remove(@PathVariable Long id) {
		// ...
	}
}

In addition to fine-grained, annotation-based configuration you’ll probably want to define some global CORS configuration as well. This is similar to using filters but can be declared within Spring MVC and combined with fine-grained @CrossOrigin configuration. By default all origins and GET, HEAD, and POST methods are allowed.

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
public class WebConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {

	@Override
	public void addCorsMappings(CorsRegistry registry) {
		registry.addMapping("/**");
	}
}

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
public class WebConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {

	@Override
	public void addCorsMappings(CorsRegistry registry) {
		registry.addMapping("/api/**")
			.allowedOrigins("https://domain2.com")
			.allowedMethods("PUT", "DELETE")
			.allowedHeaders("header1", "header2", "header3")
			.exposedHeaders("header1", "header2")
			.allowCredentials(false).maxAge(3600);
	}
}

<mvc:cors>
	<mvc:mapping path="/**" />
</mvc:cors>

<mvc:cors>

	<mvc:mapping path="/api/**"
		allowed-origins="https://domain1.com, https://domain2.com"
		allowed-methods="GET, PUT"
		allowed-headers="header1, header2, header3"
		exposed-headers="header1, header2" allow-credentials="false"
		max-age="123" />

	<mvc:mapping path="/resources/**"
		allowed-origins="https://domain1.com" />

</mvc:cors>

CorsConfiguration allows you to specify how the CORS requests should be processed: allowed origins, headers, methods, etc. It can be provided in various ways:

In order to support CORS with filter-based security frameworks like Spring Security, or with other libraries that do not support natively CORS, Spring Framework also provides a CorsFilter. Instead of using @CrossOrigin or WebMvcConfigurer#addCorsMappings(CorsRegistry), you need to register a custom filter defined like bellow:

import org.springframework.web.cors.CorsConfiguration;
import org.springframework.web.cors.UrlBasedCorsConfigurationSource;
import org.springframework.web.filter.CorsFilter;

public class MyCorsFilter extends CorsFilter {

	public MyCorsFilter() {
		super(configurationSource());
	}

	private static UrlBasedCorsConfigurationSource configurationSource() {
		CorsConfiguration config = new CorsConfiguration();
		config.setAllowCredentials(true);
		config.addAllowedOrigin("https://domain1.com");
		config.addAllowedHeader("*");
		config.addAllowedMethod("*");
		UrlBasedCorsConfigurationSource source = new UrlBasedCorsConfigurationSource();
		source.registerCorsConfiguration("/**", config);
		return source;
	}
}

You need to ensure that CorsFilter is ordered before the other filters, see this blog post about how to configure Spring Boot accordingly.