Cbio Portal with Nginx

[Yuliia Orlova]

Hi, 

I'm an advisor at SURF Research Cloud, and I'm looking into running cBioPortal on a virtual machine on our platform. I followed all the steps for the Deployment with Docker session, and there were no error messages. However, when I try to access cBioPortal, I see the portal for a second, and then the page with cBioPortal and the following message appears:

Copy-paste the error log below and provide a click-by-click description of how you arrived at the error.

{"req":{"method":"POST","url":"//cbioportalyo.surfresearchclo.src.surf-hosted.nl/api/studies/tags/fetch","data":[],"headers":{"accept":"application/json","content-type":"application/json"}},"xhr":{},"text":"Invalid CORS request","statusText":"","statusCode":403,"status":403,"statusType":4,"info":false,"ok":false,"redirect":false,"clientError":true,"serverError":false,"error":{"status":403,"method":"POST","url":"//cbioportalyo.surfresearchclo.src.surf-hosted.nl/api/studies/tags/fetch"},"created":false,"accepted":false,"noContent":false,"badRequest":false,"unauthorized":false,"notAcceptable":false,"forbidden":true,"notFound":false,"unprocessableEntity":false,"headers":{"cache-control":"no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate","connection":"keep-alive","date":"Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:01:22 GMT","expires":"0","pragma":"no-cache","server":"nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)","transfer-encoding":"chunked","vary":"Origin, Access-Control-Request-Method, Access-Control-Request-Headers","x-content-type-options":"nosniff","x-frame-options":"DENY","x-xss-protection":"0","content-type":null},"header":{"cache-control":"no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate","connection":"keep-alive","date":"Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:01:22 GMT","expires":"0","pragma":"no-cache","server":"nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)","transfer-encoding":"chunked","vary":"Origin, Access-Control-Request-Method, Access-Control-Request-Headers","x-content-type-options":"nosniff","x-frame-options":"DENY","x-xss-protection":"0","content-type":null},"type":"","links":{},"body":null,"url":"https://cbioportalyo.surfresearchclo.src.surf-hosted.nl/"}

I suspect that the issue could be related to the fact that we configure all web applications with Nginx, so the cbioportal-container is running on the https://cbioportalyo.surfresearchclo.src.surf-hosted.nl/ (in my case), and not on http://localhost:8080, as expected in the documentation. 

Could you please let me know what can go wrong here?

Best regards,

Yuliia