Update to DSpace 8 from Dspace 7.6.2 angular frontend problems

[Matthias Letsch]

Hi there,

I am trying to update our DSpace 7.6.2 instance to Dpace 8.0

The backend update didn't cause any problems. It runs and our test url with /server shows the HAL browser with Status 200 and all the endpoints working.

But the angular frontend turns out to be a major challenge:
A merge with our existing dspace 7.6.2 and our theme generated over 400 merge conflicts, so I downloaded dspace 8 angular as a new separate project instead to start there from scratch (and carefully transfer our theme afterwards). 

I can install, build and start the dspace 8.0 angular project with yarn start:dev and I copied the rest configuration from 7.6.2 into my new config(.dev).yml (host: our-test-url.de)

If I open localhost:4001, the ui is shown but with "500 Service unavailable"

If I open our test url (in which the backend can be found under /server and in which e.g. 7.6.2 worked fine), it shows "503 service unavailable"

The console says something like:
"Cross-origin request blocked: The same-origin rule prohibits reading the external resource at .../server/api (Reason: CORS header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' is missing). Status code: 403."
"Cross-origin request blocked: The same-origin rule forbids reading the external resource at  .../server/api (Reason: CORS request failed). Status code: (null)."

Unfortunately, I don't know what to set up here so that the frontend
1. can be accessed at our test URL (and not only via localhost:4001) and
2. can access the backend via the REST interface. 

Can someone help me here, please?

Many thanks in advance and best regards,
Matthias Letsch

[Andrew Thompson]

Checkout "403 Forbidden" error with a message that says "Access is denied. Invalid CSRF Token" section from the Installing DSpace docs. You can also set the environment variable rest__P__cors__P__allowed__D__origins before running DSpace backend to a comma separated list of something like: http://localhost:4001,https://localhost:4001 which tells the backend to tell the browser to allow cross origin requests.

-Andrew