Flutter’s New Web Dev Proxy: A Cleaner Way to Handle APIs (No More CORS Headaches)

If you’ve ever built a Flutter web app, you’ve probably run into one annoying issue: CORS errors during development. Traditionally, fixing this meant: tweaking backend headers setting up a reverse proxy (like Nginx) or using messy workarounds But Flutter recently introduced something that simplifies all of this: A built-in web development proxy And honestly, it’s one of those small features that makes a huge difference in day-to-day workflow. What Is Flutter’s Web Dev Proxy? Flutter now allows you to define a local proxy using a simple config file: web_dev_config.yaml This lets your Flutter web app forward API requests to your backend automatically, without worrying about CORS. My Setup Here’s the exact configuration I’m using: server: host: "0.0.0.0" port: 8000 proxy: - target: "<target_url>" prefix: "/api/" - target: "<target_url>" prefix: "/files/" How It Works This setup means: Requests to /api/... → forwarded to your backend Requests to /files/... → also forwarded to y