OPTIONS request method

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. Its been available across browsers since July 2015.

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The OPTIONS HTTP method requests permitted communication options for a given URL or server. This can be used to test the allowed HTTP methods for a request, or to determine whether a request would succeed when making a CORS preflighted request. A client can specify a URL with this method, or an asterisk (*) to refer to the entire server.

Request has body	May*
Successful response has body	May
Safe	Yes
Idempotent	Yes
Cacheable	No
Allowed in HTML forms	No

* Although an OPTIONS message with a request body is technically allowed, it has no defined semantics. You may include a body in an OPTIONS message as long as you provide a valid Content-Type header, and when you know the server expects it, as behavior is implementation-specific.

Syntax

http

OPTIONS *|<request-target>["?"<query>] HTTP/1.1

The request target may be either in 'asterisk form' * indicating the whole server, or a request target as is common with other methods:

*: Indicates that the client wishes to request OPTIONS for the server as a whole, as opposed to a specific named resource of that server.
<request-target>: Identifies the target resource of the request when combined with the information provided in the Host header. This is an absolute path (e.g., /path/to/file.html) in requests to an origin server, and an absolute URL in requests to proxies (e.g., http://www.example.com/path/to/file.html).
<query> Optional: An optional query component preceded by a question-mark ?. Often used to carry identifying information in the form of key=value pairs.

Examples

Identifying allowed request methods

To find out which request methods a server supports, one can use the curl command-line program to issue an OPTIONS request:

bash

curl -X OPTIONS https://example.org -i

This creates the following HTTP request:

http

OPTIONS / HTTP/2
Host: example.org
User-Agent: curl/8.7.1
Accept: */*

The response contains an Allow header that holds the allowed methods:

http

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Allow: OPTIONS, GET, HEAD, POST
Cache-Control: max-age=604800
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2016 11:45:00 GMT
Server: EOS (lax004/2813)

Preflighted requests in CORS

In CORS, a preflight request is sent with the OPTIONS method so that the server can respond if it is acceptable to send the request. In this example, we will request permission for these parameters:

The Access-Control-Request-Method header sent in the preflight request tells the server that when the actual request is sent, it will have a POST request method.
The Access-Control-Request-Headers header tells the server that when the actual request is sent, it will have the X-PINGOTHER and Content-Type headers.

http

OPTIONS /resources/post-here/ HTTP/1.1
Host: bar.example
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Origin: https://foo.example
Access-Control-Request-Method: POST
Access-Control-Request-Headers: content-type,x-pingother

The server now can respond if it will accept a request under these circumstances. In this example, the server response says that:

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: The https://foo.example origin is permitted to request the bar.example/resources/post-here/ URL via the following:
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST, GET, and OPTIONS are permitted methods for the URL. (This header is similar to the Allow response header, but used only for CORS.)
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: X-PINGOTHER and Content-Type are permitted request headers for the URL.
Access-Control-Max-Age: The above permissions may be cached for 86,400 seconds (1 day).

http

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:15:39 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.61 (Unix)
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://foo.example
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST, GET, OPTIONS
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: X-PINGOTHER, Content-Type
Access-Control-Max-Age: 86400
Vary: Accept-Encoding, Origin
Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive

Note: Both 200 OK and 204 No Content are permitted status codes, but some browsers incorrectly believe 204 No Content applies to the resource and do not send a subsequent request to fetch it.