Another solution to bypass CORS for your own files
If you have files you want to share, you don't want to put them on your own server account (maybe b/c you don't have one), and you're running into CORS issues with a script trying to access them elsewhere, there's a way to use Dropbox that has been around for a while but isn't very well-known.
First, I'll say that Dropbox has an advantage over lots of file-sharing sites in that you can access it in a few different ways:
- Directly on their Website
- Their app running in your OS so it looks like a normal folder
- Via their API (TMS Cloud Pack has an interface for it)
Also, their daily bandwith limitaions are absurdly high.
Basic [ie, "free"] accounts and accounts on a trial of a Dropbox team: 20 GB of bandwidth and 100,000 downloads per day .
Plus, Family, Standard, and Professional accounts: 1 TB and unlimited downloads per day.
Dropbox team Advanced and Enterprise accounts: 4 TB and unlimited downloads per day.
You can get hold of a link to post online from their website or their app and it looks like this:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/x12nrdio8i9oe52/sample-3s.mp3?dl=0
The querystring arg dl=0 can be changed to dl=1 for use in a browser to initiate a download rather than opening it up in the browser. But if you do that via a script, you'll get a CORS error.
So here's the secret: change the link to look like this:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/x12nrdio8i9oe52/sample-3s.mp3
That is, change the domain name and remove the ?dl=0 querystring argument from the end of the URL.
This version runs in my WEB Core app while the earlier one gives a CORS error.
According to the whois record, the domain name dropboxusercontent.com is owned by Dropbox themselves, so it's not going to be intercepted by some unknown 3rd-party (which is I think how it got started). Searching Google for it shows a lot of complaints that it doesn't work, but most of them were from several years ago. Not much lately.