In this post, I wrote about how you might draw a graph using the HTML canvas; my next step was to make that more efficient; however, upon trying to import a Javascript module into my script:

import animatedGraphics from './animatedGraphics';

I started getting this error:

Access to script at ‘file:///C:/repos/webanimations/animated-columns-optimised/columns.js’ from origin ‘null’ has been blocked by CORS policy: Cross origin requests are only supported for protocol schemes: http, data, chrome, chrome-extension, https.

After a bit of digging, I uncovered a feature of ES6 that prevents opening this directly in a browser.

Hosting the site locally

The issue is caused because the file is being opened directly; so there seemed to be a couple of ways around this: one is to disable the security in Chrome, although try as I might, I couldn’t manage to get it to give up the ghost: I tried various combinations around the —disable-web-security flag of Chrome.

The second option is to host the site locally. For a brief moment I considered using something like IIS Express; but fortunately, I came across this tool that hosts a site locally for you.

It can be installed as an npm package:

npm install --global http-server

Once installed, you just navigate to the relevant directory, and type http-server:

C:\\repos\\webanimations\\animated-columns-optimised>http-server
Starting up http-server, serving ./
Available on:
  http://192.168.1.79:8080
  http://127.0.0.1:8080
  http://172.17.230.225:8080
Hit CTRL-C to stop the server

You can then navigate to your specific page; for example:

http://127.0.0.1:8080/columns

And no more CORS error (doesn’t quite work yet, but that’s a whole different story).