In the modern web development landscape, it's common for your React frontend to communicate with a backend API running on a different domain or port. While this separation of concerns offers numerous benefits, it often introduces a notorious hurdle: Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). Browsers, for security reasons, restrict web pages from making requests to a different origin than the one that served the application.
During development, this can be a significant friction point. Fortunately, React offers several elegant ways to circumvent CORS issues in your local environment by leveraging proxying. This article will delve into the primary proxy options available for your React app, providing detailed setup examples to smooth out your development workflow.
Understanding the Problem: CORS in a Nutshell
Imagine your React app running on http://localhost:3000
needs to fetch data from your backend API at `http://localh