[ckan-discuss] CORS Enabled CKAN

Thu Oct 28 12:28:19 BST 2010

Hi folks,

So there's a mounting campaign, http://esw.w3.org/CORS_Enabled to
introduce the header 

	Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

for sites which provide an open data API of some sort. This means
that JavaScript hosted elsewhere can fetch data from, .e.g the
CKAN API. This means visualisations and such become much easier.
It's not implemented everywhere yet but in the (near) future will
hopefully make using open data services all the easier.

The relevant Apache configuration parameter is

	Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"

And the headers module must be loaded. All very lightweight,
just a minor configuration change with no forseeable side-effects
(for the open data case, closed data and intranets and such are
a different story).

I've implemented this on the main CKAN site, will also do so on
the country-specific ones today (unless somebody strongly
objects). This should also be put into the deployment templates
for new CKAN instances as it should be the default behaviour.

Happy hacking,
-w