The answer
For public APIs without credentials, yes. For APIs with credentials (cookies, auth), no. Use the specific origin instead. The wildcard allows any website to make requests, which can be a security risk for authenticated APIs.
CORS Security Best Practices
Is Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * safe?
More FAQs in CORS Security Best Practices
const allowedOrigins = ['https://myapp.com', 'https://admin.myapp.com']; if (allowedOrigins.includes(req.headers.origin)) res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', req.headers.origin);
No. Only allow the methods you actually use. If your API only uses GET and POST, do not include PUT, DELETE, PATCH. This reduces the attack surface.
A header that tells the browser how long to cache the preflight result. Setting it to 3600 (1 hour) means the browser does not send a new OPTIONS request for that URL for 1 hour, reducing overhead.
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