Proxy requests to a separate backend server with vue-cli

In @vue/cli 3.x:

  • Create a vue.config.js file in the root folder of your project, if you don't already have one.
  • Have its contents as follows:
// vue.config.js
module.exports = {
  devServer: {
    proxy: {
      "/gists": {
        target: "https://api.github.com",
        secure: false
      }
    }
  }
};

Now any call to (assuming your dev server is at localhost:8080) http://localhost:8080/gists will be redirected to https://api.github.com/gists.


Another example: proxying all calls

Say you have a local backend server that is typically deployed at localhost:5000 and you want to redirect all calls to /api/anything to it. Use:

// vue.config.js
module.exports = {
    devServer: {
        proxy: {
            "/api/*": {
                target: "http://localhost:5000",
                secure: false
            }
        }
    }
};

If you use webpack template with vue-cli, then you can find the required information in this reference document:

http://vuejs-templates.github.io/webpack/proxy.html

Or instead of changing your template now, you may copy the relevant config from the webpack template into your local webpack-simple template.

EDIT: more info from my local setup

This is what I have in my config/index.js under module.exports:

dev: {
    env: require('./dev.env'),
    port: 4200,
    assetsSubDirectory: 'static',
    assetsPublicPath: '/',
    proxyTable: {
        '/api': {
            target: 'http://localhost:8080',
            changeOrigin: true
        },
        '/images': {
            target: 'http://localhost:8080',
            changeOrigin: true
        },
        // and so on...

The above config runs my vue-cli on port 4200, and I run my server on port 8080.

EDIT: Corrected info about CORS after comment #4 and #5

Note:

  • The changeOrigin option in dev.proxyTable (in webpack config) ensures that you do not need to serve CORS headers on your server API responses.
  • If you decide to omit changeOrigin for any reason, then you need to ensure that your server API includes Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * (or equivalent) in its response headers.

References:

  1. https://stackoverflow.com/a/36662307/654825
  2. https://github.com/chimurai/http-proxy-middleware

module.exports = {

    devServer: {
        proxy: {
            '/api': {
                target: 'http://genius.net',
                changeOrigin: true,
                pathRewrite: {
                    '^/api': ''
                }
            },
            '/auth': {
                target: 'http://genius23.net',
                changeOrigin: true,
                pathRewrite: {
                    '^/auth': ''
                }
            },
        }
    }

};